Housing initiatives for the elderly. Local and community-based alternatives to the challenge of deinstitutionalisation of care (ALTERCARE)

This project aims to explore housing initiatives for older people (existing or in development) proposed as alternatives to the existing care model at home or in assisted living facilities. Our hypothesis proposes that the development of initiatives focused on the creation of publicly oriented housing for the elderly, substitutes to the care at home and to the nursing homes, will allow the defamiliarisation of care, and will contribute to avoid the territorial, social class, gender and origin inequalities inherent to the present model.

Specifically, we aim to locate, map and analyse local and community-oriented initiatives that innovate with regard to residential options for older people in order to overcome the difficulties and dilemma of choosing between ageing at home or in an institutionalised environment, especially when a loss of autonomy emerges as part of the ageing process.

Our intention is to contribute to these initiatives ceasing to be alternative, facilitating deinstitutionalisation policies and subverting class, gender and origin inequities that underlie access to and provision of care for older people. It is precisely to address these inequities that the project adopts an intersectional perspective. We are also interested in approaching these initiatives from a territorial perspective, given the greater ageing of rural areas and their limited access to social and health care resources, which are not widely deployed in these territories.

We propose an ethnographic and collaborative methodological design, based on case studies. The ethnography will be multi-situated and comparative, so as to allow us to articulate both a general and a detailed picture of such housing models situation. We will proceed to collect the experiences and narratives of both the users and the promoters, workers and other agents involved in the different initiatives. Likewise, we plan to gather data from digital sources to enable the mapping of local and community housing initiatives. Also, data related to public policies on housing, health and social services concerning ageing populations will also be assembled.

The results will try to overcome the fragmented view of social policy, providing knowledge on public policies in housing, social services and health, taking into account the level of social and health coordination, the competence framework and the relationship with the paradigm of deinstitutionalisation of long-term care.