Doctor of Philosophy, Gabrielle Halpern published
Tous centaures!
In praise of hybridization
(Le Pommier, 2020).
To discover
Michel Houellebecq: "A civilization which legalizes euthanasia loses all rights to respect"
In a report published earlier this week, the Defender of Rights warned about "
respect
for the fundamental rights of elderly people in nursing homes"
: freedom to come and go, taking into account consent, the right to maintain family ties, respect for dignity, lack of resources and staff ... The Covid-19 has put a real spotlight on retirement homes , which until now were a blind spot in our society. But this terrible situation did not start with the health crisis, since more than 900 complaints denouncing the conditions and modalities of medico-social support that have been addressed to the Defender of Rights over the past six years. This issue is not only of interest to public and private decision-makers, nor should it be the concern of older people only; it constitutes an eminently political subject which questions a certain vision of society.Retirement homes affect us all, regardless of our age.
In reality, the problem is much deeper; it is the very way we think about retirement homes, how we design them, how we build them, that should be reinvented. We must first question the very word “retirement”, which, etymologically, means “to withdraw”. This means that we are removing these people from the world. This idea is terrible and it is urgent to rethink these establishments to put their residents back at the heart of the world.
To achieve this, public decision-makers must first stop considering the elderly as a “box” in their political program or action plan; in the same way, we must stop considering the “
silver economy
” as a specific sector of activity, because it is the best way to create a society in silos. All companies, from all industries, should be interested. By dint of categorizing the population, public and private decision-makers prevent themselves from thinking about and constructing a true generational hybridization.
Let us hybridize retirement homes with museums, restaurants, research laboratories, sports halls, nurseries, start-up incubators and theaters, so that they welcome other audiences and other activities.
Gabrielle Halpern
We have the impression that the retirement home sits there, like an island in the middle of the ocean with no connection to the neighborhood. If you live next door to one of them and you don't have a family member living there, you have no reason to go. We need to make retirement homes places that are open to the neighborhood, to the city, where all generations meet and do activities together. Of course, all lovers of standards will tell us that the subject is complicated, that a building welcoming an elderly public has particular standards, sometimes incompatible with the standards of a building welcoming other audiences or other activities. It is time to put an end to these standards, these regulations, these laws, based on a "drive for homogeneity",which systematically put individuals in boxes and which create social, generational and territorial divisions.
It is necessary to question our need to arrange citizens, things, ideas, activities, buildings and uses, in boxes. These labels that we believe to be reassuring and that we spend our lives sticking on others and on things, however, make us completely miss the reality of the world. They lead us, in spite of ourselves, to hurt this reality, by cutting it into pieces. We approach the world with a brain in the form of a cabinet with drawers. By dint of devoting a cult to identity for centuries - identically - we have forgotten that the world is fundamentally hybrid, that is to say heterogeneous, mixed, contradictory, and that in a hybrid world . You have to learn to hybridize and hybridize.
So, let's hybridize retirement homes with museums, restaurants, research laboratories, sports halls, nurseries, start-up incubators and theaters, so that they welcome other audiences and others. activities. Let's transform our retirement homes into third places to make them places of life and learning.