Senior Cohousing: An Emerging Residential Resource

Abstract

Elders, are often seen in Western society as passive agents of their own reality. The present work proposes to know aging from a 2.0 perspective. Thus, it has observed the elderly as participatory entities of their own change, forced in part by a systemic failure of the Welfare State, which has helped to promote ideas of change in those who don’t want to leave their future in the hands of external decisions and plan an active aging formalized in self-managed housing and surrounded by the people they choose. For more than two years, we are working on the search and reading of a diverse bibliography that shows the journey of more than five decades, which has cohousing. We’ve been in contact with several centers of cohousing and residential ones, in a personalized way when possible, or online when geographical distances preclude a closer approach. Ous objective has been to find out what benefits this mode of coexistence brings to society, to users, and even to institutions, and also to analyze the role of the social worker, still incipient in our country too, in these coexistence models.