Abstract
The nature of the increasingly ageing populations of developed countries places residential issues of these populations at the heart of urban policy. Retirement villages as housing options for older adults in Australia has been growing steadily in recent years; however, there have been a dearth of geographical studies looking into the distribution of existing retirement villages at the regional level. This study aims to reveal the geographical distributions and cluster patterns of retirement villages in the Greater Brisbane Region of Australia to better understand and serve the living requirements of current and potential retirement village residents. The geovisualization method was adopted to visually explore the distribution patterns of retirement villages. The Global Moran’s I and Local Moran’s I measures were employed to analyze the spatial correlation and the clusters of retirement villages in the study region. The study revealed that distribution of retirement villages was not random (z-score = 7.11; p < 0.001), but clustered in nature and included hotspot patterns, especially along the coastline and Brisbane River areas. Moreover, for-profit and not-for-profit retirement villages have different distribution patterns and adopted significantly different tenure agreements. In the study region, the spatial distribution of retirement villages aligns with the aggregation trend of older residents. The findings of this study disclosed the spatial distribution patterns of retirement villages and will provide developers and policymakers with geographically referenced data for the choice of new development sites to meet the market demand of potential customers, forming aged-friendly development strategies, and eventually leading to improved quality of life for older Australians.
Highlights
Population ageing has always been a topic of widespread concern all over the world.To balance between institutional and non-institutional care, housing options for older people have been created to meet the diversity of needs in the community, such as villages, naturally-occurring retirement communities, cohousing and university-based retirement communities etc. [1]
As the location information of the registered retirement villages is available at the suburb level, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) census information of household members [19] (65 years old and above) who usually reside in the households on the State Suburbs (SSC) level was used for data analysis
1, most1,ofmost the of the retirement villages were located in the local government areas of Brisbane region retirement villages were located in the local government areas of Brisbane region (n = 73)
Summary
Population ageing has always been a topic of widespread concern all over the world.To balance between institutional and non-institutional care, housing options for older people have been created to meet the diversity of needs in the community, such as villages, naturally-occurring retirement communities, cohousing and university-based retirement communities etc. [1]. Population ageing has always been a topic of widespread concern all over the world. To balance between institutional and non-institutional care, housing options for older people have been created to meet the diversity of needs in the community, such as villages, naturally-occurring retirement communities, cohousing and university-based retirement communities etc. Retirement villages have become a viable housing option for older people since they address some of the physical and social issues for older people, which are usually reflected in improving the service quality and promoting the convenience of facilities [2]. In Australia, the retirement village industry currently accommodates approximately 5.7% of Australians aged 65+ and 10% of those 75+. Uptake is expected to rise to around 7.5% (over 380,000 aged 65+) by 2025 [3].
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