Havens and Heavens of Ageing-in-Community: Home, Care and Age in Senior Co-housing

This chapter draws on an ethnographic study of the senior co-housing movement conducted in Spain from 2013–17. We explore the process of infrastructuring home and care in these developments to reveal two modes of doing home in aging-in-community: as havens, places where older people feel safe and preserve their identity and autonomy, and heavens, places where people join together in a collective project with the aim of transforming their environment and themselves as they age. By foregrounding the conflictive intersections between these modes of doing home in the projects mentioned, we discuss the continuities and discontinuities with traditional home care and residential care settings, and the gender and later-life configurations that these two modes of doing home materialize in senior co-housing.

López Gómez, D., Estrada Canal, M., & Farré Montalà, L. (2020). Havens and Heavens of Ageing-in-Community: Home, Care and Age in Senior Co-housing. In B. Pasveer, O. Synnes, & I. Moser (Eds.), Ways of Home Making in Care for Later Life (pp. 159-181). Singapore: Springer Singapore.