ABSTRACT
This chapter asks what age-friendly planning and policy might learn from communities that are intentionally designed to combat isolation through a more communal way of life. Rather than presenting findings from one specific study, this chapter introduces a framework of key concepts within which to explore the well-being benefits of more collective and cooperative living arrangements. This builds on a well-established body of feminist scholarship identifying a wide range of urban and rural design experiments, such as on co-housing and ecovillages. It then draws attention to ‘niche’ intentional community, developed and evidenced through ethnographic illustrations, to argue that issues of housing, health, social support and personal care intersect in the ‘how’ as well as the ‘where’ of domestic arrangements. While current debate tends to conceive age-friendly communities instrumentally, top-down, this chapter draws attention to informal, relational processes of mutual health and well-being that formal structures largely take for granted, and may threaten to undermine. It therefore also sheds light on the collective processes of social organising that need to be better understood if we are to design age-friendly communities, combat social isolation and support socially connected, resilient communities.
