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 Deane Simpson shows that already today there are urban structures that have arisen to accommodate the changed third age of life, as pictured above in Arizona, USA.
Society is becoming increasingly older – and the wishes and needs of seniors are changing rapidly, particularly in industrialized countries. The “young old” of today and tomorrow are active and mobile. Sooner or later, this fact will affect the development of cities and districts. In his dissertation “Third Age Urbanism: Retirement Utopias of the Young-Old”, New Zealand architect Deane Simpson investigates the relationships between demographic, social, and urban development – a seldom applied approach. The holistic way of thinking behind this dissertation at the ETH Zurich was one of the reasons the Holcim Foundation supported it with a financial grant at its Forum 2007 in Shanghai.
Deane Simpson shows that already today there are urban structures that have arisen to accommodate the changed third age of life, for example, “The Villages of Florida” near Orlando or “Urbanizaciones” in the Spanish Costa del Sol. “Huis ten Bosch” – a Dutch theme park in Japan that was transformed into a residential complex for seniors – with its spatially-related approach shows trends that are gaining increasing importance also in contemporary work on the aged community, says Simpson. Another consequence of the mobile, linked urbanism of the third age is mobile-home communities for seniors in the USA.
The 240-page research study, finished in 2010, has been praised by respected authorities: Researcher on ageing François Höpflinger, qualifies it as providing “new, sometimes path-breaking theoretical perspectives for understanding current urbanism processes of the third age of life.” Architect and dissertation advisor Marc Angélil, former member of the Management Board of the Holcim Foundation, speaks even of the most enthusiastic judgment he has ever written about a dissertation: “It is an extremely important investigation of the global demographic challenges of our time.”
Excerpt of Leisure Nomads of the New Third Age: Nomadic Network Urbanism of the Senior RV Community in the US
 read abstract (PDF, 97KB)
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