After long discussions in many days and months, we came up with four core goals for this project as follows:
1. Developing the culturally appropriate architectural design and care program
2. Applying the concept of aging in community
- Developed countries : creating intentional community
- Developing countries : maintain and strengthen the existing community to care for elders
3. Learning about the social value of elder care in Sri Lanka
4. Application of the lessons learned from the past experience of long term care for elders
First, as a group of young researchers in the field of Architecture, we felt the social responsibility of developing culturally appropriate design scheme for Sri Lankan. This is actually so much more complex than one may think. It requires strong understanding of not only the local architecture, but also lifestyle, demographical and social situation, and most importantly economical capability. I am sure that this learning process will never end....
Second, I personally wanted to explore the potential application of concept of "aging in community" which is an emerging idea to care for elders in developped countries. To transfer this idea in different countries, we made adjustment and defined the concept to fit with Sri Lanka. In the USA or Japan, aging in community is considered to be an "intentional community" where people would create. However, we thought it was very important to harvest the strong culture of inter-dependent lifestyle in the existing Sri Lankan community, and maintain and even strengthen the positive aspect with the appropriate housing support.
Third, we should learn the social value of elder care from Sri Lanka. This action will be essential to this project, however, more importantly it would be a valuable investment that we can learn and bring back to developed part of world.
The last goal was that we wanted to avoid making the same mistakes that developed part of world already experienced, such as hospital like long term care environment, neglect, isolation, or other negative histories of elderly care. We believe that it is our responsibility to inform our mistakes for them to avoid, so that elders in Sri Lanka will be treated with respect.
I will report the current aging situation in Sri Lanka in the next post.
3 comments:
Hello,
I stumbled across your blog and was wondering if it was possible for you to get in touch with me if you are still in this field of work.
I work for a Sri Lankan NGO that is currently making a new senior residencies project in the West coast of SL, we will complete construction in september and target paying elders who cannot live with their families and hope to provide them with a specialist care.
Our NGO website is www.pinasrilanka.org bear in mind that thus far we have not worked with elders, this is our first such project.
Please do contact me on if you are interested in speaking to us. My email address is jenatrix8@gmail.com
I look foward to hearing from you,
J. A.
Greetings!
I see that you are quite interested in aging populations. I am working on a website that is focused on aginag populations on a global scale. If you get this, consider sending me an email and let's see if we can potentially work together!
Peter Marquardt, Eugene, Oregon, U.S.A.
The website is
www.goldenboomers.com (retiring baby boomers)and you can find me on Facebook in Goldenboomers.com
I am still developing the site so there is much room for creative design/content. I will be quoting you on the next blog entry.
Thank you for reading this!
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