Co-Housing as a Strategy to Combat Relational Poverty of Older People

Abstract

The pandemic experience from Covid-19 has heightened the awareness of the impact that relational poverty has on the quality of life, especially of older people’s lives. The obligation to stay inside their homes to protect them from the risk of infection has had the indirect effect of precipitating many elderly people into a state of solitude from which, at least in part, the city had been protecting them until then. The pandemic has shown how older citizens live the shortage of relationships and the solitude of housing as factors that can heavily affect the quality of their lives. But this difficult historical moment has been an opportunity to implement a series of projects dedicated to over 65 people so that they could be guaranteed a fullness of possibilities. Within them there is “CondiViviamo” activated in Bari (Italy) and focused on the possibility of realizing an experience of cohousing as an instrument to contrast the economic uneasiness and, above all, the relational poverty. The starting assumption is both to guarantee older people a better existential condition, and to make them protagonists of this process. The project, carried out in a multifactorial perspective, is initially aimed at a limited number of elderly subjects, but it has the secondary purpose of defining a model exportable to other cities in the same territory of Apulian region and even at national level. The analysis of the outcomes of the project will also be functional to the definition of future operational guidelines for public social policies.
 
 Received: 22 August 2022 / Accepted: 20 October 2022 / Published: 5 November 2022

Active aging and urban policies: the space as an instrument for an inclusive and sustainable city

“…These important quantitative changes have to be combined with substantial qualitative ones in social representations of third age and, therefore, in meaning that being seniors comes to assume. “In recent decades, being seniors has begun to be considered no longer as a mere residual condition against the active role of adult workers, but rather a completely new phase full of opportunities and possibilities, but also of limits and difficulties” ( Carrera, 2022b , p. 3). Lidia Ravera writes: “third half of life” is a good time to practice changing” ( Ravera, 2023 , p. 12), reflecting on the possibility, referring above all to women, of valuing third age as a moment of fullness and self-esteem.…”

“…The awareness around the centrality of urban space in supporting a functional ageing process lies at the heart of the WHO’s choice to start the program of age-friendly cities with a twofold objective: firstly, to support the exchange of information between cities in order to speed up their transformation into suitable centers for seniors people, and secondly, to provide guidance for the development of related policies at regional and local level ( Carrera, 2022a , b ). The initiative began in 2006 with a preliminary analysis of various cities around the world and an evaluation of the facilities and services that make a city really age-friendly.…”

“…It points to a horizon of new, somehow liminal, interstitial spaces that allow the social construction and the construction of radical changes, enabling creative responses to changes occurring within the urban space. The third space creates opportunities for relationships, cultural and leisure initiatives between different people, who may establish more long-term forms of associations ( Carrera, 2022a , b ).…”

“…Despite strong architectural and functional differences, these models of rethinking home living have in common red thread of specific objectives, that can be listed as following: (a) de-institutionalization and socialization in favor of older citizens, with a view on integrating private and public provision of services, aimed at promoting the quality of life and ensuring the right to a full quality process of aging; (b) ability to recognize the risk of social isolation and to counteract them through different lifestyles implying experiences of sharing and daily cohabitation; (c) reinforcing the idea of older people with skills and resources useful self and mutual care; (d) overcoming situations of loneliness, sometimes abandonment, and socio-economic hardship through the reception of these model of shared home; (e) strengthening the quantity and quality of links with the informal network (family, friends, volunteers, etc. ); (f) involvement of the older people in decision-making and practical processes; greater self-care, in terms of physical and psychological health; and active role in supporting the social plan shared with the Territorial Social Services ( Carrera, 2022b , p. 8).…”