Where social policy and planning meet: Provision of care for the elderly in densification projects

This paper contributes to an emerging recognition of the role of planning as a spatial intervention to mitigate the care gap. “Care gap” has entered scholarly and policy debates to refer to the growing mismatch between the care needs and shrinking material and immaterial resources allocated for its provision following the austerity and neoliberal restructuring of many public services. Apart from social and economic factors contributing to the growing care gap, ageing stands out as a pressing demographic challenge that urges public policy response at all governmental levels. While federal social policies primarily regulate direct/indirect subsidies to make care accessible for those who depend on it, the allocation of space for the delivery and the performance of care remains a spatial planning challenge at the local level. Our central research question concerns the spatial planning instruments and strategies that public authorities use at the local level for the governance of care. We conducted a single case study of Nieuwegein (Netherlands), one of the first Dutch municipalities to formulate a policy combining housing and care by introducing a planning instrument called “care circles.” Based on the analysis of interviews with planning officials, landowners, and developers, as well as the planning documents and reports, our initial findings demonstrate the prominence of private law contracts between the public authority and for-profit market actors to address the care gap through housing projects. Therefore, implementing policy objectives strongly depends on negotiations between public and private interests. We argue that with the continuous rollback of the state from essential social services, local governments are pushed to act more entrepreneurially to incentivize the provision of elderly housing on an ad-hoc basis. This study demonstrates that socially sustainable urban policy responses to the care gap require deliberate coordination between social policy and land use planning to mitigate the growing care crisis in ageing societies for inclusive and just cities.