Senior cohousing: democratize eldery care

Abstract

Senior cohousing is making its way in the Spanish State as an alternative model of eldery care versus the pressing care crisis we currently experience as a society. The consumer cooperative Los Milagros, Residencial Santa Clara in Málaga (Spain), is the oldest project of this kind in the Spanish context and is based on the association of people with shared needs seeking a collective and mutual solution. This article presents the results of a qualitative case study from the perspective of feminist economics and its bridges with the social economy. Adopting the framework of the democratization of care, developed by Ezquerra and Mansilla (2018), as our starting point, the following questions are posed: 1) In what way do senior cohousing projects promote recognition of the social centrality of care? 2) Can they be considered a strategy of socialization of care toward the community? 3) Do they contribute in any way to redistribute care work among different subjects? 4) How do they facilitate people’s empowerment built upon their care needs? The main conclusions suggest that, on the one hand, consumer cooperativism can harbor a strategy of collective and solidary assumption of care, helping to recognize its social and economic value and, at the same time, it can move toward a nonstigmatized vision of old age and the needs that characterize this moment in the vital cycle. On the other hand, we argue that economic access barriers reduce its democratizing potential for society as a whole. Finally, there is a lack of questioning of the feminization of care, and this questioning is inescapable if we want to overcome the patriarchal resolution of care.