Introduction

It is customary to think of housing for older people as housing for people with ‘special needs’, but, as society ages, older people's living arrangements will undoubtedly become a major component within mainstream housing. What is more, older people are quite unlike any other ‘special needs’ category because they are ‘our future selves’. This chapter argues that pressures in the UK may already be precipitating a fundamental shift in how housing and care are conceived, produced, procured and experienced by older people. The emerging, more inclusive approach to housing has the potential to transform radically the way in which everyone's ‘lifestyle choices’ are configured and constrained. In particular, policy decisions and design strategies that are being implemented now could affect the extent to which older people are either incorporated into the mainstream or continue to be ‘architecturally disabled’ by the residential settings of the future. However, deep-seated social forces may prevent this important debate from receiving adequate public attention, so that the emerging emphasis on offering the next generation of older people a wider spectrum of lifestyle choices could turn out to be largely illusory, particularly for the poorest and most disadvantaged in society.

Medical and architectural disability

In his most recent edition of Designing for the disabled, sub-titled The new paradigm, Selwyn Goldsmith (1997) sets out his theoretical position on the relationship between ‘medical disability’ and ‘architectural disability’. Medical disability describes a process by which individuals are disabled in that they cannot do things because their bodily functions are impaired. Within the population, there is a continuum running from the most able-bodied and active individuals to the most severely disabled people. Architectural disability refers to how the physical design, layout and construction of buildings and places can confront people with hazards and barriers that make the built environment inconvenient, uncomfortable or unsafe for everyone to use, and may even prevent some people from using it at all. When the built environment is sufficiently generous to meet the needs of all or most medically disabled people, people will not be architecturally disabled by the building. When normal provision is not so accommodating, the people who are not architecturally disabled will be those not inconvenienced by their environment, whereas all those who are inconvenienced will be architecturally disabled, regardless of their physical or medical condition.