Affective entanglements of aging and architecture Understanding the relationship between wellbeing, housing and aging in Flanders

Abstract

In Flanders, people are often deeply attached to their housing environment. As Flanders is characterized by an aging population, both policy and individuals are turning to the strategy of aging in place. However, this strategy creates a tension when combined with a housing culture characterized by a strong preference for privately owned, suburban single-family houses and urban sprawl. This doctoral thesis aims to understand the relationship between housing environments, architectural design, wellbeing and aging in a Flemish context.

This thesis adopts an interdisciplinary approach which combines architecture and environmental gerontology. Theoretically, it builds on posthumanism to approach the research themes of aging and wellbeing from a more-than-human perspective. Methodologically, it employs interviews with inhabitants in their own dwellings, interviews with the architects who designed those dwellings, research-by-design, and drawing-based research methods.

The research is structured around four studies. Study 1 develops a socio-physical framework which addresses wellbeing in a way that is grounded in the architectural environment. Study 2 adopts the concept of person-home-assemblages to understand how wellbeing emerges from the relations between persons and places over time. Study 3 uses research-by-design to imagine intergenerational housing projects in a Flemish village. Study 4 seeks to understand the relationship between architectural design and dwelling through affect theory.

This thesis proposes that housing can take on the role of an entanglement. As an entanglement, housing environments become a site out of which wellbeing emerges from the relations between inhabitants, material environments and broader socio-material contexts. Within these entanglements, inhabitants and environments are understood as co-constitutive and co-evolving entities of a person-home-assemblage. Furthermore, this thesis understands architectural design as a practice that transforms the affective potentiality of those assemblages. Dwelling and design are understood to move back and forth as creative, interdependent parts of a cyclical process. Consequently, an architectural design approach is proposed based on embodiment, distributed relationality and indeterminate temporalities as central characteristics of designing for wellbeing.

Aligned with material gerontology and posthumanism, these findings introduce a conceptual shift from a human-centered to a more-than-human approach, understanding the aging of inhabitants as inseparable from the agency and transformation of the material world.