Research on Planning and Architecture Design of Elderly Care Facilities in Rural Communities

Abstract

In 2020, the Chinese elderly population over 60 years old accounted for 18.7% of the total population, so the aging is very serious. At the same time, due to the late development of China, the elderly care system is imperfect, and elderly care facilities are incomplete. Coupled with the gradual coreization of the family structure, the increase of empty-nesters, and the decline in family care ability, it has triggered a more urgent need for elderly care and has attracted great attention from the government in recent years.With the development of cities, Chinese rural areas have been affected by urban siphoning, which has further exacerbated a series of problems such as the aging of the rural population and the hollowing of land use. In previous studies, rural issues and elderly care issues are often studied separately. Meanwhile, elderly care issues tend to focus more on cities, so more attention should be put on rural areas now. Therefore, this article takes the planning and design of rural community elderly care facilities as the topic, discusses the solutions to the rural elderly care problems in mega-cities, and proposes rural elderly care planning and architectural design strategies. Firstly, the author sorts out the domestic and foreign literature reviews on elderly care and rural areas and introduces the causes and solutions of the two major issues in a macroscopic view. Secondly, I research elderly care-related data to understand the current situation of rural elderly care in Shanghai and the needs of the elderly. Thirdly, through the field and internet research of the elderly care facilities in Shanghai's urban and rural areas, the similarities and differences are analyzed from the four aspects of coverage, service & function configuration, scale, and operating cost & resource utilization. At the same time, I also analyze the advantages and disadvantages of the development of elderly care facilities in the countryside compared with the cities. Fourthly, I analyze relevant cases at home and abroad, and summarize strategies from two levels of planning and architectural design. Then I propose the possibility of using rural community resources to create a multi-functional rural elderly care facility system to alleviate the two major problems in rural areas. Finally, I propose the core strategy of planning and design. After that, I select Maoxin Village, Shihudang Town, Shanghai as the site for the architectural design of elderly care facilities, and the new strategy will be applied to the practice design. It is hoped that through the integration of rural and elderly care issues, disadvantages can be turned into advantages. In addition, the author also hopes that the new strategy can provide some useful references for the planning and architectural design of other rural elderly care facilities in the future.