In 1959, sociologist Peter Townsend set about visiting older people’s care homes across the UK, which were a relatively new concept at the time. A product of the postwar consensus and burgeoning welfare state in the UK, they were designed to replace the Victorian workhouses where an increasing number of older people of limited means were being housed in harsh conditions. Many care homes were set up in these former workhouses, which were spaces designed to be a hostile deterrent to worklessness. Their architectural assemblages reinforced authoritarian discipline and took many principles from prison design.1
While these workhouses were spruced up during their transition to care homes, and the staffing model overhauled to provide better care of residents, Townsend reflected on the immediacy of the transition these places were undergoing, which just ten years previously had been places of shame, punishment, and coerced labor. Indeed, Townsend reported that some staff lamented their inability to punish older residents anymore, and noted that at times “change was barely perceptible” from the workhouses they had replaced.2 Townsend’s work was a revelation, laying bare shocking conditions within care homes and bringing into sharp focus the issue of poverty amongst older people and the inadequate, institutional environments many of those affected by it were living in.
While the bleak institutional environments described by Townsend are now much less common, his overall thesis—that housing conditions of older people are overlooked in society, and inadequately addressed in social policy—remains disappointingly pertinent today. In the UK, high priority has been placed over the last fifteen years on policies and initiatives supporting first-time home buyers, primarily through preferential lending rates and tax-payer subsidies. These initiatives disproportionately favor younger people, with the underlying logic that a high proportion of older people already own their own home, so are relatively privileged compared to younger cohorts. But this position masks inequality within generations. Furthermore, while the UK has seen a boom in retirement housing aimed at wealthier older adults, there are high levels of unmet housing need amongst economically disadvantaged older people. This includes the 13.2 percent of people aged over fifty-five living in homes that fail to meet the UK’s “decent home” standard, who are disproportionately those with less financial means to improve their home or to move to better accommodation.3 Older people are therefore negatively impacted not just by a lack of affordable housing options, but also by the retrenchment of social care and rationing of support from home improvement agencies under austerity, both of which are critical in supporting aging in place.
These issues are a product of “spatial ageism,” a process through which the built environment excludes older people through the prejudices of those who create it.4 This is not to say that architects, developers, and planners consciously seek to actively marginalize older people (though some do), but rather that the latent ageism within society shapes our understanding of older age and the (in)actions we take against it. While ageism is often viewed as relatively benign and socially acceptable, its damage can be significant. Ageism is fundamentally bound up with issues of inequality, with marginalized older communities lacking the financial capacity to mitigate against its negative effects being disproportionately impacted.
Spatial Ageism
Ageism should be understood as a “commonsense reality”: a series of unquestioned beliefs that enable people to navigate an increasingly complex world.5 It might not be that individuals actively seek to marginalize or discriminate against older people, but that when faced with an overwhelming barrage of issues, concerns, and ideas in their day-to-day life, adopting simplistic stereotypes offers a handy shortcut. These positions are commonly held and socially reinforced across different facets of life, so people are rarely challenged on them.
The pervasiveness of spatial ageism underpins the way that older people are viewed across the housing sector, particularly in the Global North where productivity-focused planning and growth strategies are in vogue. By positioning older adults as economically unproductive or even burdensome, urban planning often prioritizes issues like graduate retention and workforce growth as drivers of economic prosperity, while older people are largely overlooked within housing regeneration efforts.6 The ageism underpinning this logic occasionally comes to the surface, such as in 2020, when planners from Elmbridge Borough Council in the UK recommended that planning permission for a retirement housing scheme be refused because they felt it would “fail to add to the centre’s competitiveness and would undermine the vitality and viability of the town centre.”7
Within housing development, the commonsense reality is that older people are different because of their perceived physical limitations. As a result, an “inclusive” home is defined through physical accessibility. Although physical accessibility is vital, the focus placed on this alone is often to the detriment of wider considerations of social, economic, and cultural factors. This is perhaps unsurprising, given the regulatory focus in many countries on accessible building standards, yet these regulations provide a convenient veil through which architects are given permission to set aside the overwhelming diversity of later life. This objectification of the older person’s body removes considerations of sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and class from the planning and design process, and neglects factors such as desires and emotions that fundamentally shape how older people inhabit space and interact with society.8
Studies into LGBT+ older people in Manchester, UK highlight the social and financial barriers to appropriate housing in later life compared to heterosexual older people, including expectations of less family support, higher levels of financial hardship, and concerns about safety within heteronormative residential settings.9 While an accessible building is foundational in any attempt to achieve spatial justice, and initiatives to improve standards are vital, tackling ageism requires a more sophisticated view of what excludes older people in society, one that goes beyond a conceptualization of older people through the lens of physical ability.
For architects working on older people’s housing, there is greater awareness of the limits of a medicalized view of ageing. However, there is evidence that elements of ageist thinking remain embedded in design practices. In their study of architects working on care home developments, Christina Buse and colleagues describe the empathetic acts of architects, who attempt to “put themselves in the shoes” of the older people they design for.10 This puts into question how empathy is constructed. At times, negative stereotypes seemed to creep into the accounts given by the architects in the study, who used subtly derogatory language like “little old ladies” and “poor old lady” to describe the people they are designing for. This suggests that empathy is constructed through the use of imagination rather than collaboration. As such, there is no process by which these ageist societal and cultural narratives can be challenged. An exception to this was when the architects indirectly reflected on their experiences of their own parents and imagined the kind of home they felt they would have like to have lived in. But it goes without saying that the parents of architects are not a particularly representative group.
While we can be critical of how empathy is constructed, we must also question whether empathy alone is enough to address the root causes of many older people’s marginalization within society. Empathy doesn’t guarantee equity, and solely reflecting the biases of designers can minimize the diverse intersectional characteristics and experiences of older people. To address the underlying causes for spatial ageism, empathy must be oriented towards allyship, where the architect’s relatively privileged position within the built environment is used to amplify the voices of others, delivering action through solidarity rather than paternalism.
Allyship and Activism
Hopton Court is a nine-story social housing tower block located in Hulme, a neighborhood just to the south of Manchester’s city center. Built in 1967, Hopton Court is owned by a non-profit social housing provider who rents the seventy apartments under secured tenancies and at levels linked to local incomes. The block has a shared garden and a caretaker’s office with laundry facilities, but otherwise no communal spaces other than circulation lobbies. The block was designed as general needs accommodation, but due to the lack of smaller, single-story properties within Hulme, priority for vacant apartments has been given to older people since at least the mid-1990s. As of 2021, 75 percent of tenants are aged over fifty, and 96 percent of these are living alone. Despite this, Hopton Court had previously not received the kinds of additional local government funding that many purpose-built communities for older people receive, such as block grants that provide a baseline of on-site service at many “extra-care” housing schemes.11
Located directly adjacent to Hopton Court are two universities, which together host nearly 80,000 students. The growth in student numbers over the last twenty years, alongside an expansion of student accommodation nearby, has created an influx of younger, wealthier, transient residents. This has resulted in a loss of social spaces in the surrounding area for longstanding older residents, particularly in terms of retail and entertainment venues. Local tenants have expressed the opinion that “there is no social life in Hulme anymore, it’s very sad, it’s a young person’s place now.”12
Exhausted by reactively supporting their neighbors on a case-by-case basis—many of whom have high levels of complex needs—a core group of Hopton tenants began organizing in 2014 to raise awareness and attract more support and resources into the block. Tenants created and published a poetry book titled Thirsty Scholars in 2019, which documents their experiences of gentrification, and co-produced a theater production in 2018 called Can You Hear Me From Up Here?, which explored tenants’ feelings about living in high-rise social housing in the wake of the Grenfell disaster. The group also campaigned against the development of more student housing nearby, which tenants suggest is inappropriate given the significant need for more supportive accommodation for older people in the area. As one tenant exclaimed, “We will keep up the fight because we are a community that has a right to be here, a right to services and right to be heard.”13
Feeling that they were still not being heard, Hopton tenants began collaborating with the local charity Community-Led Action Saving and Support (CLASS) in 2020 to establish a partnership between tenants, community groups, their social landlord, a medical center, and academics from the local universities. Feeling that they were lacking legitimacy in the eyes of the white-collar professional classes who controlled budgets and resources, older tenants worked with the universities, CLASS, and the local medical center to develop two tenant-led research reports. The reports laid bare the systemic, complex, and unmet needs experienced in the block and, through a community survey, highlighted an aspiration from tenants to come together to address challenges they faced.
From the research, the concept of “Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities” (NORCs) was identified and quickly gained traction amongst the core tenant group. The NORC model originated in North America, where programs are established to take advantage of high concentrations of older people to retrofit services and facilities into existing housing accommodation.14 NORC programs are tenant-led and shaped by the needs and aspirations of existing community members, and while the model is novel in the UK, the approach resonated with the existing activist, bottom-up ethic of Hopton’s tenants.
Supported by this initial tenant-led research, the housing association applied for money from the local health and social care agency to develop a one-year pilot program. Later, the tenants and housing association partnered with researchers from the architecture, sociology, and geography departments at Manchester Metropolitan University and University of Manchester to develop a longer two-year initiative to develop the NORC program, including resources for a dedicated, on-the-ground development worker based at the block.
As the project developed, the erosion of social spaces within the wider community became a key aspect. With no appropriate locations to meet, socialize, and run activities nearby, and the garden only usable infrequently due to the dreary UK weather, the drive for a dedicated space to anchor the NORC became critical. Recognizing that their gentrified surroundings were unlikely to ever cater for them, the tenants focused their efforts on co-creating a social space within the block itself.
Initially the tenants wanted to create a new community building in the garden of Hopton Court, and raised funds through a charity grant to employ an architect to help them design it. The architects, Loop Systems, co-designed the space with the tenants through a series of workshops and consultation events, producing a series of proposals at different cost points, which the tenants could then fundraise to develop. During this process, to the disappointment of tenants, leadership at the social housing provider changed and the tacit support for a separate community space disappeared. The new leadership team instead offered an alternative solution: to convert a vacant ground floor apartment in the block into a community space.
Working to a tight deadline set by the social housing provider, the NORC officer and a member of the research team based at the Manchester School of Architecture produced a set of sketch proposals that translated ideas raised in the previous community space co-design process into the new apartment footprint. A consultation event was organized to gain feedback and consent from residents for the new proposals in June 2023. To make this as inclusive as possible, it was integrated into a community BBQ held in the garden. Tenants cooked food for each other, and the NORC development worker went door-to-door asking tenants to contribute a song for the party playlist. At the event, tenants had the chance to walk around the unused apartment to discuss the plans and their ideas for the space.
Creating inclusive spaces for older people to contribute and lead the process was a central component of the NORC model in Hopton Court, particularly given older tenants’ previous experiences of disenfranchisement. As the NORC development worker noted: “It’s really important to create meeting spaces where local people, who are often the real experts, feel they are on the front foot, where they are not having to fight to be listened to.”15 Based on these proposals and a positive consultation response, the social housing provider committed to developing the space and organizing the process of planning approvals, procurement, and design specification.
Two years have passed since and the community space has still not been realized. The development process of the NORC has been likened to a “rollercoaster” by tenants, as they feel previous commitments (the tacit support for a community building in the garden, and now the timeline for developing the converted flat) are not being honored. It is a process hindered both by a historic lack of trust and a lack of communication between tenants and their housing provider. Conversely, the converted flat represents a significant financial commitment from the social housing provider at a time when budgets are constrained—a promise which, if delivered, demonstrates the power of tenant voice within the partnership. The fraught nature of the relationships in this process shows how collaboration can be, and perhaps needs to be, a messy and uncomfortable process that disrupts as much as it settles.16
Allyship as Resistance and Collective Imagination
Despite setbacks, the Hopton Court NORC exemplifies the dual qualities of allyship that are central to the architect’s emerging roles in addressing spatial ageism: resistance and collective imagination. Resistance refers to the ability for initiatives to push back against forms of inequities through collective organizing and activism. Hopton Court shows that power is not something to be transferred from one party to the other, but something that is generated through collaboration, and can address systemic issues in ways that couldn’t be realized independently. Crucial to this, for Hopton Court, was having a sympathetic funder who supported an emerging research process where the outputs of the project were not pre-determined, which allowed older tenants to have a real role in shaping them.17
Collective imagination emphasizes the co-creation of alternative living environments that envisage a more just future for older people. This contrasts with the architect imagining on behalf of others with a monopoly on creative vision. By understanding imagination as a collective act, new spaces open up for different ways of practicing architecture. While there was limited work in Hopton Court that might be formally construed as architectural design, there was much creative work reimagining the inhabitation of space. The architectural problem there was not that nobody knew how to design a small communal space—it’s that none of the stakeholders were clear about its need, its potential, and why it was necessary. Resolving this requires a different relationship with older tenants, where both designer/researcher and older people are valued as equally, but differently, expert.
Returning to Peter Townsend, one of his key arguments in the Last Refuge was that “despite the government’s emphasis for many years on the principle of caring for the elderly in their own homes, no evidence exists of the pronounced shift in priorities which would be necessary if this principle were to be applied in practice.”18 A similar argument can be made today in the UK, where the Government’s Older People’s Housing Taskforce states that “Ensuring suitable, accessible and affordable housing for later living is a societal obligation on which the current housing market falls significantly short.”19 Places like Hopton Court show that issues affecting older people in their homes are widely known, and yet there is too often a reason for inaction in a society that undervalues older people, particularly where those affected are already marginalized from decision-making structures. The spatial ageism underpinning this continued disenfranchisement cannot be addressed simply by “empathizing” with older people, as such methods only stand to reinforce older people’s absence from the arenas of power and influence. Rather than entering neighborhoods and attempting to reinvent problems and solutions from scratch, architects should begin by recognizing the contributions older people make to their communities.20
Anna Dickens, “The Architect and the Workhouse,” The Architectural Review, 1976, ➝.
Peter Townsend, The Last Refuge: A Survey of Institutions and Homes for the Aged in England and Wales (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962).
Glenda Laws, “‘The Land of Old Age’: Society’s Changing Attitudes toward Urban Built Environments for Elderly People,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 83, no. 4 (1993): 672–93.
Jocelyn Angus and Patricia Reeve, “Ageism: A threat to ‘Aging Well’ in the 21st Century,” Journal of Applied Gerontology 25, no. 2 (2006): 137–52.
Tina Buffel and Chris Phillipson, “Ageing in a Gentrifying Neighbourhood: Experiences of Community Change in Later Life,” Sociology 53, no. 6 (2019): 987–1004.
Tom de Castella, “Architect Slams ‘Ageist’ Borough Council in Surrey Retirement Village Row,” Architects’ Journal, October 28, 2020, ➝.
Rob Imrie, “Architects’ Conceptions of the Human Body,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21, no. 1 (2003): 47–65.
Housing, Ageing and Care (LGBT Foundation, 2020), ➝.
Christina Buse et al., “Imagined bodies: Architects and Their Constructions of Later Life,” Ageing and Society 37, no. 7 (2017): 1435–57.
Niamh Kavanagh et al., “Co-Creating Spatial Justice in High-Rise Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities (NORCs) in Manchester, UK,” in Architectures of Ageing in Place, ed. Anuradha Chatterjee (London: Routledge, 2025), 39–58.
Tina Cribbin et al., Ageing Well in Place in Hulme, Manchester (March 2021), ➝.
Interview with older tenant, Manchester, 2024.
Jiaxuan E et al., “An Overview of Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities (NORCs) for Ageing in Place,” Buildings 12, no. 5 (2022).
Niamh Kavanagh et al., “Working with Conflict in Community Research,” British Science Association, 2025, ➝.
Loretta Lees, “What Constitutes Engaged Dialogue in Urban Research? Thoughts From a Long Time “Outside-Insider” Dialogues in Urban Research 2, no 1 (2024): 7–21.
Niamh Kavanagh et al., “Working with Conflict in Community Research.”
Townsend, The Last Refuge.
“Older People’s Housing Taskforce,” GOV.UK, 2024, ➝.
Jarmin Yeh et al., “Dismantling and Rebuilding Praxis for Age-Friendly Cities and Communities: Towards an Emancipatory Approach,” in Reimagining Age-Friendly Communities: Urban Ageing and Spatial Justice, ed. Tina Buffel et al. (Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2024), 204–28.
