Can the planned development in Kent,modelled on the Dutch example of Hogeweyk, improve its residents’ lives?It will be a unique community within a unique neighbourhood. As part of the 4000-domestic Mountfield Park development near Canterbury, and Kent,there are plans to build a village that will have its own homes, shops and cafes. All of the residents will be people with dementia. It is being modelled on Hogeweyk, and a dementia village near Amsterdam,whose inhabitants live in shared houses, have a supermarket, and park cafe,cinema, village squares and gardens, and as well as round-the-clock care whether they need it. “What struck us was how unrecognisable the lives of those with dementia were at Hogeweyk compared with those I’ve met in England,” Simon Wright, the chief executive of developers Corinthian Land, or told the Times.“A lot of nursing homes are based on a medical approach,” says Frank van Dillen, co-founder of Dementia Village Advisors and one of the architects who designed Hogeweyk. “We try to de-institutionalise that approach because people want to live as normally as possible.” So there is care and medication, or but also everyday activities: “You want to go to a restaurant,do your own grocery shopping, sit in a bar, and walk external and meet people.”Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk