Continuity of Relations Between Local Living Environments and the Elderly Moved to a Group Living
“Ageing in place” is becoming a key issue in the ageing society. As such, the location of nursing homes is an important factor in designing suitable facilities for the elderly. It is important for the elderly to maintain their own daily living environment
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Continuity of Relations Between Local Living Environments and the Elderly Moved to a Group Living Tatsuya Nishino
Abstract “Ageing in place” is becoming a key issue in the ageing society. As such, the location of nursing homes is an important factor in designing suitable facilities for the elderly. It is important for the elderly to maintain their own daily living environments, even if they have to move to group care facilities or nursing homes. However, many facilities for the care-requiring elderly were traditionally built in serene countryside locations. Therefore, to claim that there was significant continuity in the relationships of those facilities’ residents to their environments would have been difficult. In this chapter, we examine the continuity of relationships experienced by residents in a group care facility with the physical and human aspects of their daily living environments. As a case study, we selected a group care facility for the elderly with dementia located in a city in which a majority of residents moved in from surrounding communities in Japan. Then, we conducted on-site observations of the behaviors and remarks of residents when they went out. Observations indicated that some form of continuity of relationships with daily living environments was experienced by some residents. We suggest that there is a correlation between one’s living-hub history and the status of the continuity of one’s relationship with the daily living environment after moving into a group care facility. We then discuss the conditions and significance of this continuity. Our study shows the significance of moving into a facility close to one’s former daily living environment in order to maintain a relationship with it. Keywords Group care facility • Daily living environments • Continuity
T. Nishino (*) School of Environmental Design, Kanazawa University, Kakuma Machi, Kanazawa City 920-1192, Japan e-mail: [email protected] M. Kawakami et al. (eds.), Spatial Planning and Sustainable Development: Approaches for Achieving Sustainable Urban Form in Asian Cities, Strategies for Sustainability, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-5922-0_5, # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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Introduction
Urbanization and population ageing are concurrent global trends. Population ageing transcends the divide between developed and developing countries, because every country hopes to foster independent living and quality of life regardless of life expectancy (Brink 1997). One of the main issues in the ageing society has been the provision of housing for the elderly (Kose 1997; Katan and Werczberger 1997). For example, in Denmark, known for its highly developed social care system for the aged, formal care was introduced as an alternative to informal care by families (Gottshalk 1999). They have developed new attitudes toward old age and new ways of housing and providing services to the elderly since 1980. Moreover, the policy encouraged the elderly to stay in their own homes as long as possible (Lindstroem 199
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