Aging Better Through Intergenerational Relationships: Fostering Visibility and Belonging in Later Life

Abstract

Growing older in the contemporary city is increasingly a solitary experience. Aging is too often framed through decline and dependency, like a final withdrawal from productive life rather than a continued stage of participation, contribution, and belonging. This societal narrative has influenced not only how older adults see themselves, but how the environments designed for them have taken form, quietly withdrawing them from the social and generational life of the city around them. As the proportion of older adults continues to grow, with seniors projected to comprise between 21% and 23% of Canada’s population by 2030, the question of how to house them well has become one of the most urgent spatial challenges of our time. The result is a growing crisis of loneliness and diminished visibility that no amount of clinical care has been able to adequately address. This thesis argues that the problem is in part spatial, and that architecture has a meaningful role to play in responding to it. Through the lens of intergenerational relationships and shared practices that occur between people of different generations, it proposes a reimagining of independent and assisted living as a model of community life rather than residential provision. The design proposal is situated in Flemingdon Park, Toronto, a dense and culturally rich neighbourhood on the edge of significant urban transformation, where the need for affordable, inclusive, and socially connected senior housing is both urgent and timely. At its core this thesis is about expanding the definition of what senior housing can be. It is about designing environments where older adults are not managed but seen and genuinely included in the life of the city and the generations that share it with them.