The ‘Return’ of the Retirement Home – KU Leuven
KU Leuven Health Humanities Lecture Series: Health and the Built Environment
Lezing: The ‘Return’ of the Retirement Home
Hoe zagen Nederlandse bejaardentehuizen eruit na de Tweede Wereldoorlog – en wat zeggen ze over de idealen van zorg en zelfstandigheid toen en nu? Historica Karin Bijsterveld (Universiteit Maastricht) onderzoekt het ontwerp en beleid achter deze woonvormen, en reflecteert op de recente politieke roep om hun ‘terugkeer’ door partijen als de BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB) en de Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV).
📅 Datum: dinsdag 22 mei 2025
🕒 Tijd: 04:00 PM to 05:15 PM (Europe/Brussels / UTC200)
📍 Locatie: KU Leuven Aula Emma Vorlat (Edward Van Evenstraat 4, 3000 Leuven) and online via Zoom
🎟️ Toegang: gratis aanmelden kan HIER
‘We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us’, or so Winston Churchill once said. For better or for worse, our constructed physical space – the so-called built environment – impacts on our behaviours, our social interactions, and our physical and mental health. The speakers of this year’s LCH² lecture series discuss various examples of the relationship between architectural space and human well-being, from across a range of health humanities, including architecture, literary and colonial history, sociology, and disability studies. In doing so, they will touch on themes as varied as the role of the corridor in hospital architecture, the connections between buildings and disabled bodies in science fiction movies, and the architectural evolution of retirement homes. Join us online and on campus, at KU Leuven, for a series of inspiring health humanities talks about the built environment.
The ‘Return’ of the Retirement Home: Anthropology, Architecture and Policy Analysis in the Historiography of Postwar Housing for Older People in the Netherlands
In 2023, two Dutch political parties, the BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB) and the Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV), mentioned the ‘return’ of the retirement home (bejaardentehuis) in their election campaigns. Which type of retirement home design did the politicians behind these campaigns actually have in mind? To what extent were their suggestions in line with the ideals about and design of residential homes for older people in the Netherlands in the years after World War II? What are the implications of the differences between the ideas back then and now, also beyond the Dutch context? Through the analysis of policy documents about the design of and postcards from post-war Dutch residential homes – informed by the work of anthropologists and architectural theorists – this talk shows how these homes performed both care and ‘independence,’ and what it is that today’s politicians seem to ignore.
Karin Bijsterveld
Karin Bijsterveld is historian and full professor at Maastricht University. Her PhD thesis was about the history of ageing (Geen kwestie van leeftijd, Van Gennep 1996). She recently returned to this topic in the volume Interdisciplinarity in the Scholarly Life Cycle (Palgrave 2023, with Aagje Swinnen). Most of her other work focuses on the history of sound in science, technology and culture. Examples are Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (MIT 2008), The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford UP 2012, with Trevor Pinch), and the OA-monograph Sonic Skills (Palgrave 2019).
