Deane Simpson: Socio-demographic Plastics

The lecture will address current architectural and urban developmental transformations that have emerged as a consequence of one of the key demographic changes of our time: the aging population. The research provides a distinction between the individual phases of aging and identifies among them a group known as the "young old," which represents a sort of Petri dish for experiments with subjectivity, collectivity, and environment. The lecture will elucidate both the escape and emancipatory dimensions of these practices, revealing a previously hidden urban and architectural phenomenon taking place in North America, Europe, and Asia.
This relatively new sociodemographic group carries its idealized freedoms and other specific opportunities that essentially define an emancipatory and utopian experimental practice. Given the lack of existing protocols for this practice, there now arises a necessity to devise new models for how, where, and with whom this group will live. A central role in this process plays the involvement of idealized representations of utopian forms of life at the crossroads of urbanism, demographics, and marketing practices. Whether it's utopias of youth (without youth), urban utopias of low density with rich urban services, utopias of a vacation that never ends, or climate utopias situated within what Juan Palop-Casado refers to as the "Geometries of Paradise." This utopian emancipatory impulse relates here less to the classical expression of place versus non-place but rather to the concept of utopia by Ruth Levitas as a "method" of experimental engagement in an effort to challenge the status quo.
The lecture will also focus on the other side of this issue – the search for a form of escape from the experience resulting from a quadruple dystopia of segregation, securitization, privatization, and denial. A number of implemented forms of housing designed for "Active Adult," such as The Villages in Florida, deploy aggressive marketing and planning explicitly aimed at the needs of the "young old," consciously denying the real values in the final phase of life. Through ownership and censorship of local media, general disempowerment of local residents, and economic and ecological exploitation of the territory, the developer of The Villages misuses the formats of private oversight, contributing to an undemocratic consolidation of control over local political discourse. Following the introduction of age-based segregation mechanisms at The Villages, the community, just like the "young old," can symbolize an increasingly secure and more segregated space in general. In such a model, the "safe" isolation of extensive segregated urban areas expresses the trumping of community agendas over societal agendas. A growing number of retirement communities that politically vote against construction and investment plans for schools or against supporting maternity wards point to the vulnerability and instability of intergenerational solidarity and the cohesion of our societies as a whole under the weight of ongoing processes of late capitalism.
Deane Simpson is a professor of architecture, urbanism, and urban planning at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (KADK) School of Architecture in Copenhagen. Together with Charles Bessard, he leads the international master's program in Urbanism and Social Change. His research focuses on contemporary urban and architectural conditions and themes, such as the urban implications of extensive demographic transformation, social and ecological sustainability within the urban and regional environment, issues related to the securitization of public space, and spatial conditions adapted to the transformation of Nordic welfare systems. Simpson is the author of the book Young-Old: Urban Utopias of Aging Society (Lars Müller Publishers, 2015) and co-editor of the books The City between Freedom and Security (Birkhäuser, 2017) and Atlas of the Copenhagens (Ruby Press, 2018).