Deane Simpson

Deane Simpson, Socioplastic Demographics, 28 de abril de 2016. Fotografía: Pablo Gerson, Juan Ignacio Palma, Sebastián Izquierdo. Archivo EAEU.

Socioplastic Demographics Deane Simpson

Socioplastic Demographics aborda las particulares implicaciones urbanas y arquitectónicas de una de las transformaciones sociales dominantes de fines del siglo XX y principios del XXI: el envejecimiento de la población. Distinguiendo entre las diferentes fases de la edad avanzada, la investigación identifica el grupo conocido como joven-viejo como una placa de Petri para experimentos de formas alteradas de la subjetividad, la colectividad y el medio ambiente. Publicado como YoungOld: Urban Utopias of an Aging Society, el proyecto documenta, a través de fotografías, diagramas, mapas y dibujos, formas emergentes de organización espacial asociadas a este grupo social. Estas van desde los paisajes urbanos continuos y accesibles en carrito de golf en la comunidad de retiro más grande del mundo en Florida, Estados Unidos, y las urbanizaciones mono-nacionales de la casa de retiro de Europa en la Costa del Sol, España, hasta la comunidad residencial de tema holandés Huis Ten Bosch en el sur de Japón, y la comunidad nómada de vehículos recreacionales para personas mayores en los Estados Unidos. En la investigación de este campo de latente novedad urbanística y arquitectónica, se discuten las dimensiones emancipadoras y de evasión de estas prácticas, con las características principales de estas formas emergentes de organización espacial, conceptualizadas como un problema sociodemográfico de la materia. Longevity Revolution

The context for a discussion on aging is the massive restructuring of the age composition of our populations: from those dominated by the young to those dominated by the old. There is a proportional loss of youth and a proportional growth of older people. This structural change has two essential factors: the declining of fertility and the expansion of longevity. This is being called a longevity revolution, a revolution that is not a Darwinian bio-evolutionary transformation, but a major shift connected to a process of industrialization and urbanization, with social transformations attached.

Dependency

Since the middle part of the twentieth century we have a new narrative in our lives, a new life phase referred to as the young-old. This is the first time in which we see the old age bifurcating into the younger old and the older old. The old-old would be closer to the traditionally understood old age, based on the notion of dependence, whereas the young-old represents a period in which older persons are both free of disabilities and free from the responsibilities of the first and second age. This liberation has been described as a late form of freedom. It involves a whole set of new conditions for society. The implications of this change have been discussed largely in terms of a crisis concerning the economic sustainability of the nation state associated with dependency: how can the working age population support such a large number of retirees?

New Subjectivity

The young-old, or third age, is entirely unprecedented in human history. New forms and ecologies of subjectivity are being experimented around these individuals. This means a series of emerging forms and technologies around social collectives, operating beyond the nuclear family or the workplace. There are experiments that tackle this new subjectivity in the form of early retirement communities built around the idea of a permanent state

of leisure. This subjectivity plays out also at a bodily level, in the idea of the biochemical arrangement of the body in a constant state of correction and tuning in response to gradual decline.

New Collectivity

The emerging social collectivities place new questions on how society and the urban setting are organized. Experiments operate as part of a counter discussion to the dominant discourse of the old-old. When we discuss aging and senior society in relation to architecture and urbanism, we need to address institutionalized care in the multigenerational household. An additional or supplementary discourse around an entirely different set of logics, ethos, scales, conceptions, architectural and urban formats must be put in motion.

Post-metropolitan Strip

Costa del Sol, on the coast of Spain, has become, particularity since the 1970’s, a major hub of northern and western European retirement migration. This has produced extraordinary growth, from the little urban material of the 1950’s to the extraordinary massive expansion that has formed a linear post-metropolitan condition, effectively a continuous strip along the coast.

National Bubbles

The urban ecology of Costa del Sol is made up of three different ecologies. To the north stand the original towns, or fishing villages, surrounded by an infrastructural layer around the tourism sector, and then a southern layer dominated by retirement migrants. The urbanizations are bubbles dominated by single nationalities. There are urbanization enclaves dominated by British retired migrants, Germans, or Nordic retirees. This produces a remarkable situation in which environments function as lifestyle products, collapsing the exoticism of being in Spain with the familiarity of the home settings of the original countries of these migrants. Elastic Subjectivity

Residents curate their relationship to the place and their identity. It becomes a curatorial project of elastic subjectivities. The architectural correlates are the exoticism of the Spanish exterior, the Mediterranean village style, and the Irish Pub interior. This plays out in radical ways around a schizophrenia between an extreme theming and the familiarity of the home setting.

Transpositions

Huis Ten Bosch is a Dutch-style theme park located in the south of Japan, described by a British sociologist as the theme park to end all theme parks. Developed in the 1980’s, it was a convenient way for Japanese people to encounter foreign culture in their own terms. The residential complex is adjacent and intimately attached to the theme park, and spaces are built around European architecture tropes, like fire places and other western arrangements for the organization of the interior. The theme park structure is the major public space they use on an everyday basis, and represents a new understanding of retirement communities through the logic of entertainment.

Spontaneous Urbanism

The recreational vehicle community in the US is organized around two major infrastructural logics. One is an immaterial logic, based on the development of satellite internet technology that helps to organize the social staging of the community. Location technology is used to support connectivity in these groups. Each RV has a satellite dish that identifies it as a member of a club. This not only has a seasonal aspect, but a strong social aspect where instant activities can happen. The platform can easily orchestrate to gather a thousand RVs in one place. The second form of infrastructure is the American highway and road system, together with formal and informal parking areas that draw their map of the US territory. When you put these two infrastructures together, a social spatial connectivity and

a spontaneous form of urbanism are produced: the potential to produce large clusters of individuals with little notice.

Infrastructures of Leisure

The villages of Florida are the world’s largest retirement communities, based around an infrastructure of leisure: golf courses, downtowns, and housing with their amenities centered around lagoons, and man-made lawns and ponds. These forms of urbanism involve an infrastructure of leisure organized around a utopia of the suburban detached dwelling.

Escapism and Emancipation

One of the key terms with which to interpret this phenomenon is ambivalence. Ambivalence between a fundamental escapism and an emancipatory project: a utopian project with two sides. Young-old urbanism can be understood at the intersection of radical demographic transformation and the emergence of neo-liberal spatial practices that articulate and support escapism or abandonment of responsibility. It represents a vision, an endgame to the continued unevenness and fragmentation of the contemporary society. We could also see it as a dystopia of segregation and securitization, in which gating has become the dominant logic around how the retirement community relates to its surroundings.

Utopia

The emancipatory ambitions traditionally connected to the idea of utopia can take different forms: the climatic utopia embedded in the geometry of paradise, the vacation that never ends, the utopia of youthfulness predicated upon the eradication of youth. While these frameworks are rather banal, we can see resonances to the historical discussion of utopia, like in the work of Archigram in the 1960s, where the permanent elements of a hierarchical city are reconfigured through technological infrastructure. The lack of precedent for these organizations aligns them with the utopian discussion, which becomes the medium to instrumentalize their urbanism. Forever Home

These villages in Florida have been designed by Gary Mark, who designed the Universal Studios Theme Park. The theme of the villages is the hometown, in which retirees grew up, predominantly a small Midwestern American town, according to which, a three-dimensional narrative tells a fictitious history of a town built in the last two or three decades, including postindustrial relics that were never really industrially used, or railway lines that were never really used by railways, thus transporting the residents into their childhood, and turning their life into an idealized past, where residents feel forever young.

Extractos de la conferencia de Deane Simpson, con introducción de Santiago Bozzola, organizada por el Centro de Estudios de Arquitectura Contemporánea de la Escuela de Arquitectura y Estudios Urbanos y el Argentina Green Building Council, el 28 de abril de 2016.