The Neighbours of Intergenerational Housing: The institutional construction of elevated neighbour relations in student-senior housing projects

In advanced economies, intergenerational student-senior housing is being touted as a combined solution to two separate issues: social isolation of older people and affordability crises in student housing. Students and older people live together in these models and principally students, through discounted rent arrangements, offer care or friendship to their senior neighbours. What is striking about these schemes is how they elevate the role of neighbour to achieve certain social outcomes. In this article, we analyse a set of European and North American schemes to contribute a novel framework of neighbour-plus roles, social roles that are elevations of the typical expectations of neighbours, to scholarship on neighbours and neighbouring. Particularly, we explore how our case studies prescribed or aspired to neighbour-plus-carer or neighbour-plus-friend roles, setting out the institutional and spatial choices made by scheme management that sought to help enable these roles. Through this analysis, we contribute to the underdeveloped scholarship on student-senior intergenerational housing, offer an analytical framework for research into elevated or expanded neighbour roles, and suggest possible successful models for organisations looking to create schemes in practice.