Alvalade Neighbourhood: once modern never old (but age-friendly)

The ageing of societies is a global concern, especially in Europe. Portugal, the sixth most aged country in the world (UN, 2017), is already facing this new reality, namely, in its capital, Lisbon. The district of Alvalade, a modernist (MOD) neighbourhood built after 1945, is today a Naturally Occurring Retirement Community (NORC), therefore a good case study to analyse in which way modernist housing can cope with the ageing of its inhabitants. Besides, Alvalade was mostly built upon the strategic policy of repetition of architectural projects, to save money and build faster, resulting in dozens of similar buildings and hundreds of equal apartments. For us, this means ideal conditions to test ideas of reuse of modernist housing because of the many possibilities of location and replication throughout the neighbourhood. This paper aims therefore at providing ideas and solutions for the transformation of existing apartment buildings into Assisted Living (AL) units for their older residents. These design proposals are the result of a previous research (Carvalho, 2010) in which a thorough literature review for concepts and survey of all existing AL facilities in the Greater Lisbon area was conducted, including interviews and site visits. This allowed us to conclude which spaces and services were present at all facilities, thereby classified as fundamental (restaurant, kitchen, lounge, nurse office), which ones were present in half of them, thereby classified as important (reception, administration office, laundry), and which ones were randomly present and thereby superfluous (central corridor, veranda corridor, storage room, medical office, physiotherapy, winter garden, library, porch). Following this field research, we selected repetitive projects of buildings in Alvalade whose characteristics would allow the introduction of fundamental spaces and provision of services to function as Assisted Living. The original projects were located at the municipal archives to confirm the initial characteristics (since many of them have undergone different changes through the past six decades), resulting in the selected case studies. The three case studies we selected for this paper correspond to three levels or possibilities of intervention that we consider fundamental for an age-friendly city: public space (Bairro das Estacas), interiors (Av. Estados Unidos da América) and buildings (Av. do Brasil). Besides, they all share quite similar main modernist concepts in their spatial conception, thereby allowing the extrapolation and intertwining of conclusions. In that sense, the transparent ground floors of most modernist buildings offer shelter from sun and rain, while providing continuous public pedestrian paths away from traffic, while the rational and functional organization of interiors spaces provide clear and straight paths for better mobility for someone on a wheel-chair or using other walking aid devices. Sometimes, it also offers the possibility of co-housing or shared living arrangements between different generations while keeping autonomy and privacy inside the same apartment. Last but not least, modernist flat roofs can be used for leisure and social interaction purposes, especially for the older age groups who feel too fragile to face the public space and yet need to do some soft exercise. The main issue we will therefore address in this article is how to reuse and adapt this modernist global environment (public spaces, buildings, and interiors), respecting its original design standards and yet turning it into an age-friendly community.