Abstract
The number of older people who need help with daily tasks will increase during the next century. Currently preferences and policies aim to help older people to stay in their existing homes, to age in place, even as they become less able to care for themselves and, increasingly, live alone. However, the majority of homes in the U.S. and many other countries are not designed to support advanced old age or are not located to easily provide support and services. The paper explores the needs of older people experiencing frailty. It examines the existing range of innovations to make neighbourhoods and homes more supportive, physically, socially, and in terms of services. These include: enriching neighbourhoods, providing collective services, building all-age neighbourhoods, creating purpose-built supportive housing, developing smallscale intergenerational models, and engaging mobility, delivery, and communications innovations. Some will allow people to remain in their current dwelling but others focus on people remaining in a local community. Few are widely available at present. Urban designers can more fully engage with the multiple challenges of those who have physical, sensory, and cognitive impairments and living in solo households by becoming champions for a more comprehensive set of public realm improvements and linkages.
Highlights
The paper focuses on two central questions related to this situation: What are the specific challenges that cities and regions will have to face due to this increase in vulnerable, often single-person households? What urban design and planning strategies can better adapt places to this new reality—both already tested and plausible?
Very supportive physical environments might allow frail older people to function better for longer, but these require a coordinated set of solutions going beyond physical design, as we describe below
The number of older people will increase during the century and many will have multiple health problems, need help with daily tasks, and will live alone
Summary
Volunteer-based collectively delivered services to existing neighborhoods to allow people to age-in-place; (c) creating a range of housing and service options for older people in new large-scale developments or all-age neighborhoods; (d) providing more domestic-scaled models of purpose-built supportive housing; (e) mixing older people with others in finegrained, small-scale intergenerational housing options allowing informal care; (f) expanding mobility through low-tech and high-tech improvements; and (g) building on delivery and communications innovations to connect older people to goods, services, and networks These are issues for urban design as a field, and for the area of urban planning that intersects with it, because the physical environment plays a central role in the lives of older people at a scale beyond the individual home which has been the main focus of so much work in this area. The reasons for this vary around the world but wider implementation would benefit from champions within the fields of urban design and planning
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