ABSTRACT
This chapter contemplates the key question: “What can design do to prevent older people dying alone in super aged Japanese cities?” Dying alone is a grave issue, to be examined from various perspectives. This chapter discusses the issue from the perspective of housing design and community design. A possible answer could be that well designed small spaces can provide small and natural opportunities in daily life to make conversation among small numbers of people, especially for aged people. The chapter consists of four subsections that are organized/categorised into two parts.
In the first part, two subsections provide a set of data showing that Japan is super-aged and uses a Japanese case study to illustrate why dying alone has emerged as an issue of concern in the case of older people living in ageing “New Towns”.
In the second part, two subsections show two examples of social experiments to act against dying alone. One case study introduces the process of making a museum out of “garbage” in an old housing estate in Tokyo, and it seems to have effectively prevented the phenomenon of dying alone. The second case study describes a temporary housing design for the victims of the Tohoku Earthquake in 2011, showing that small and natural opportunities in daily life to make conversations are essential for preventing solitary death.
