Abstract
This article investigates aging-in-place among seniors who live with caretakers, particularly domestic workers who immigrate to Israel from poorer countries. In recent decades, new apartment designs are intended for families with children. Drawing on Dolores Hayden’s (1980) ‘Non-Sexist City’, we expound on Non-Ageist architecture for the aging population and migrant caregivers. We examine how this kind of residence can include additional and vulnerable groups in the population, such as seniors and their caregivers. Our study explores the design of Tel Aviv Metropolis apartments. We argue that typical apartment design affects the ethics of everyday living. Following Michel de Certeau (2011), our research observes everyday behaviors and creative tactics through which seniors and caregivers re-appropriate shared living space. Most seniors house caretakers in a room within the bedroom area of the apartment, for instance, while others use a separate room by the entrance. These practices point to hierarchy and equality as spatial aspects of typical apartments’ layout and their effect on their usage by seniors and caregivers. Our research explores the potential of a planning proposal—dividing the seniors’ apartment into a primary apartment and a secondary unit—suggested by the inter-ministerial government team in the National Housing Headquarters and by the Israeli Affordable Housing Center, an academic-social organization. We argue this division could enable better housing solutions for shared residency. Thus, the article combines qualitative research of residence in old age with analysis of the role of social values such as equality, autonomy, inclusion, affordability and communal values in old-age housing and care.
Highlights
Since the late 1980s, the intersection of global social processes—such as an aging population, work immigration, and a shift of welfare policy towards community care—have culminated in a new form of residence in Israeli society: Seniors share their residential space with their caregivers
Israel’s welfare policy encourages aging in place—the average age of those entitled to the caregiver benefit is about 83; they receive the allowance for approximately five years (Assiskovich, 2017)
Examining spaces shared by seniors and foreign domestic workers in relation to the needs of a growing elderly population, this study showed that standard architecture— catering to young families—can be measured according to its hierarchy and equality, and to the ethical effects of these qualities among senior-caregiver relations
Summary
Since the late 1980s, the intersection of global social processes—such as an aging population, work immigration, and a shift of welfare policy towards community care—have culminated in a new form of residence in Israeli society: Seniors share their residential space with their caregivers. Shared habitation of seniors and their migrant caregivers consists of a new type of housing on the Israeli market, where planning policies of aging-in-place intersect with the privatization of public services in the early years of the twenty-first century (Katan, 2002). IAHC develops new tools in the field of housing to advance policies to help medium and low-income households in Israel secure adequate and affordable housing (IAHC, n.d.; Rabinowitz, 2017) These civil society and government organizations proposed to divide the apartment without examining the proposal architecturally. In this article we discuss architectural and technical aspects of expanding a caregiver’s unit into a separate unit such as the obligation to build a protected space for each separate unit
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