Bob works with his fiancé, Julie, here in Charlottesville and around Virginia State. They work in Inclusive Design. At the moment they're involved in a project for senior citizens - an intergenerational venue designed to get older people and younger people together. Bob and Julie have been on a tour of similar projects in Europe. Bob tells me how senior citizens in the US are often excluded. Even when they're highly involved during their work lives, they often find it impossible to remain so after retirement, especially if they have health or mobility problems. He says his own parents are in their seventies. They have told him they'd rather die than go to a nursing home. He tells me about the giant retirement communities that have appeared across America in the last twenty years. They are big business. The Baby Boomer generation have money. There is one in Florida called The Villages that has a population of over 70,000. It is the fastest growing metropolitan area in the United States. It has its own newspaper and radio station. All areas of the complex are accessible by golf cart. Bob says that, despite the reputation such places have for being depressing, when you visit the better ones you can see the appeal, especially given how few options seniors have in their existing communities. But however good these complexes are, however much fun people have when they live there, the fact that the elderly are leaving their own communities surely represents a huge loss. 'They have a lot to offer that other people don't. They have rich perspectives on life, they often provide complementary parenting roles for children, they have the potential to make communities safer and more diverse.' Hence the inter-generational project he and Julie are working on.
The expanding population of senior citizens, like the population people with brain injuries, is a product, in part, of medical innovation. Transplantation, pacemakers, medication for cholesterol and blood pressure management. Such technologies have helped add more than thirty years to the average life expectancy in the US since 1900. My uncle might have been dead by now, well before his seventieth birthday, had it not been for the recently developed techniques of bypass surgery. But just like people with brain injury, elderly people are increasingly a lost resource. We live longer and longer, but increasingly spend our later years in isolation from the rest of the community.
Bob tells me about Humanitas, a project based in Bergweg, in the Netherlands, where senior citizens live within a lively community venue. 'The first thing you notice,' says Bob, 'is that the building is on a main street in the down town area. It's not separated from the rest of the community and it's physically accessible and welcoming at street level. They have a bar there. It's a nice space to be in. People of all ages come to use it as a social venue.'
Design, architecture and urban planning are all central to the question of inclusion. Decisions are continually being made about where to locate people with disabilities, people with health problems, people of advanced years. Geography and the built environment have been used for a long time to promote or prevent different kinds of relationships. To isolate or disguise, to transform, to restrict access. The fact that these people may not be able to protest as vigorously as others makes it easier to take the choice away from them. And there are deep political and cultural motives at work. The decision to build a retirement home fifteen miles from the town centre immediately defines a primary function of that institution as that of separation. It may be that some people want to live at a distance, in a contained and self-sufficient manner, but this is only a genuine choice if other realistic options exists. By deciding not to make the existing community accessible, we restrict available options and progressively homogenize our two separate communities - one for the older people, one for the younger people. It makes me think about Innisfree (see post Tuesday 12th May): a wonderful rural village where people with learning disabilities live in geographical isolation from the rest of the community. However good a life these people lead, however closely and successfully they share their lives with volunteers from outside, the value they might offer to their original communities is lost. People are ignorant about learning disability and will remain so as long as those with the disabilities are encouraged to live separately, as long as our primary communities are inaccessible to them, as long as we continue to disable them. Places like The Villages - these vast golfing nation-states for the elderly - represent a similar prospect: a future where young and old live in isolation from one another, where people reach a certain age and seem to vanish, transcending to another space, a Brave New World where aging and death become shrouded, hidden, just like disability and mental illness have been for so long. It brings to mind the Separate but Equal doctrine promulgated by some US courts during the 20th century regarding racial segregation - the idea that the only way for blacks and whites to co-exist on the same territory was to prevent them from ever seeing each other.
We do have a choice about these things. Designers, architects and engineers are all key to inclusion. They can make the difference between an atomized society and an integrated one. But they are also people who's life blood is innovation - people who need problems to solve. And no group of people has more problems than the disabled. They have been disabled by the design decisions of the past. They represent an unprecedented opportunity for innovation, for technologies and spaces and buildings that enable, and that might have countless benefits for the wider community.
There is intrinsic mutual benefit in collaboration between designers and excluded groups:
1) Identify the Unique Selling Point (USP) of _________(insert excluded group) - the experience and skills they have to offer the wider community
2) Engage designers and other innovators in projects that take advantage of these expertise, engaging the excluded people as consultants and collaborators
3) Develop products, environments and other innovations that benefit the excluded group and the wider community simultaneously - focus on things that create mutual benefit (acknowledge the fact that most needs are in fact shared)
Bob and I are sitting in the diner at the back of Timberlake's Drug Store on Charlottesville's Main Street. The place has been here since the turn of the century (the last one). The staff are all women and, to look at them, they're all above 55 years of age. They tell us things we didn't know. They point to the photographs on the walls, of previous interiors before the re-fit. They tell us what it was like back then. They seem to be having a good time. There are older customers here, but it's obviously popular with younger people to. It's retro. It's well designed. It's authentic. And the staff are good at their jobs. These are things of value however old you are.
Do you see what I see? I get off the bus at Union Station. It's 7:20pm. It's a lovely evening. I hadn't thought about it, but suddenly I am aware that I am in the same city as Barak Obama, and that thought excites me. Silly. But there it is. In conversations about the president, the following distinctions have been made between him and his predecessors:
He is not from a wealthy or powerful family.
His work background is neither in business, law, the military, nor the media. His predominant line of work before politics was as a community organiser.
He is thoughtful, articulate, moderate, a good writer and orator.
He has bucket loads of charisma.
Given these observations, the fact that he is mixed race, that he is America's first black president, seems less like a miracle and more like the icing on the cake. Nonetheless I have to fight the urge to walk up to random black people and congratulate them.
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