The Swedish governmental two year program “Growing old, Living well” was launched in 2010 with the specific intent to create innovation regarding housing for both able and frail older people. The program has been administered by the Swedish Institute for Assistive Technology (SIAT), which has diffused the allocation of 50 million Swedish crowns into various projects and studies about housing for the ageing generation. Sweden is entering the ageing country in which the group of people aged 65 years and above attains approximately 19 per cent. Apart from regular case studies on different phenomena that occur in relation to older people and housing, the Swedish government designated the architectural competition as an instrument for renewing contemporaneous thinking about ordinary and special housing for older people. National architecture competitions have been used to define space for dependent persons. These competitions have preceded reforms of the social act. In a parallel track, local architecture competitions have resulted in new housing for older people who still able reside within the stock of ordinary housing.
According to the SIAT, a total of 18 municipalities requested information about the conditions and possibilities for acquiring finical support for the organization of architecture competitions or studies about housing for senior citizen. Of these, seven applied for funding to organize competitions, but five local organizers were granted funding. Later, two municipalities suspended their competitions due to unforeseen obstacles. The program has resulted in three architectural competitions. The objective for these competitions has been to infuse creative thinking and future-oriented solutions concerning housing for the older people. The present study will shed light on how a municipal actor works with these matters and will supply a time estimate for such a planning process. The study focuses on the three municipal architectural competitions and the two pilot studies that were used as supplementary source of information regarding housing preferences. Supplemented by written documentation, the process of realizing an architecture competition or a pilot study has been reconstructed as to its dynamics. The methodology includes an inventory of competitions, case studies, document review and interviews of key-persons. By use of the competition documentation and the pilot studies, 74 informants were possible to delimit as to their participation in the process.
The decisive reason for why the governmental program Growing Older - Living Well didn’t get a better response from the municipalities lies in the timetable for the national initiative. The governmental program was not coordinated with municipal planning processes for housing. Only municipals that already started their planning could consider organizing competitions. The competitions were organized as invited competitions with a prequalification procedure. Prequalification is a selection procedure used early in the competition process to identify suitable candidates for the following design phase. Three to four teams of architects have been invited to develop design proposals. Based on the study, a set comprising of thirty detailed conclusions can be made about the municipal competitions that were arranged with support from the governmental program. However, they all converge into an overarching conclusion that states the direct link between the wording of the competition brief and the participating architects’ inclination to rethink the design task in a fundamental or moderate approach. The study concludes that the better the arranger prepare the competition brief, the more accurately will the participating architects convert this text into future-oriented architecture for older people that is active on a comprehensive level as well as on the detailed level one.
QC 20150205. QC 20160222