[ABGESAGT] Care Gap as a land policy challenge: Age-appropriate housing planning in Switzerland

Abstract

Ageing is a major global trend that affects various spheres of life, from the individual to the societal level. Due to changing infrastructural needs of a rapidly growing population of older adults, providing housing and care requires public policy response and coordination among different policy actors. This paper focuses on the institutional context of age-appropriate housing development as a spatial response to ageing in cities. Our central research question concerns how the planning for age-appropriate housing unfolds at the intersection of land use planning and ageing policy at the local level. By adopting a new institutionalist approach, we explore how institutions shape the actor strategies and the local governance of age-appropriate housing as an indicator of elderly care as a resource. We conduct a case study and focus on three age-appropriate housing projects in the region of Bern, Switzerland, to demonstrate different provision mechanisms that combine care and housing services in a rapidly ageing society with a liberal market economy and strong tradition of direct democracy. Our findings indicate that the planning for age-appropriate housing involves bundling highly regulated comprehensive care under nursing with the unregulated product of serviced apartments with softer care needs for domestic work catering to older adults. Given the real estate appetite behind age-appropriate housing projects, the negotiated public and private interests shed light on the spatiality of the care gap in cities. These findings raise further questions regarding age-appropriate housing provision’s social and economic sustainability with the available planning instruments and strategies.