A little bit of TLC (or the ludological curatrix) : developing an alternative urban practice of elderly care

• Main Author: Handler, S. M.
• Published: University College London (University of London) 2011
• Subjects: 720
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.625704

This thesis develops an Alternative Urban Practice of Elderly Care that actively attends to the neglected relationship between older people and public space through a series of temporary urban interventions and a slower paced process of writing and reflection. It opens up current limits within spatial practices and academic study that have tended (in their instrumental, policyoriented focus) to avoid more creative and playful explorations of how ageing might otherwise affect people’s everyday relationship to urban space. By drawing out the hidden etymological roots of care in curating (from the Latin curare) and evolving, via care-focused feminist ethics [Held], the invented persona of the caring ‘Curatrix’, this practice builds on the urban practice of acting ‘otherhow’ [Petrescu] with its related practice of ‘urban curating’ [Buschonten/Shalk], to enact a series of (Ludological) interventions that playfully- critically subvert the standard clinical understanding of intervention (as used in elderly care). The thesis is structured around three temporary interventions (an event/artifact/ a spatial proposition) that explore three age-specific themes in Turn (degrees of mobility/sedentary existence/levels of audibility). As these themes are worked through on-the-ground (as temporary interventions acted out with/from/for ‘the elderly’), and on the page (through a slower-paced process of critical reflection and alternative writing strategies [Rendell]) the thesis begins to broach the delicate (and hidden) relational/temporal dynamics of a practice engaged, simultaneously, in play, care, fantasy and critique. In its playfully shifting tone and mode, working not only across disciplinary, practice/theory boundaries or generational (old/young) lines but across boundaries of temper too, this Alternative Urban Practice of Elderly Care advances a model of practice where carefully attending to people’s changing relationship to public space in older age involves a dual process of intervention/ reflection that shifts deliberately in its inflection between the careful, careless and the carefree.