Beyond the Care Home: What Japan can teach us about intergenerational approaches to later living

Written by Siri Zanelli, Architect and Founding Partner at Collective Works, Housing LIN Case Study No. 184 draws on a research trip to Japan - a super-aged society since the turn of the millennium - to ask what the UK can learn as its own population ages.

Siri visited three facilities: Ginmokusei Centre in Kanagawa, where a street-facing sweet shop links residents with local schoolchildren; Long House With Engawa, a timber day-care centre and community hub beside a bamboo forest in Chiba; and Kasugadai Center Center in Kanagawa, which brings together dementia housing, daycare, an after school club, a coin laundry and a snack bar on a town square.

What stood out was not room size or technology, but the overlap of functions, intergenerational placemaking and a rethink of who is the caregiver and who is being cared for. Siri closes by imagining how UK schools, almshouses and social care buildings could open up to their neighbours, creating more connected and healthier communities.