Improving housing and neighborhoods for the vulnerable: older people, small households, urban design, and planning
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Improving housing and neighborhoods for the vulnerable: older people, small households, urban design, and planning Ann Forsyth1 · Jennifer Molinsky2 · Har Ye Kan3
© Springer Nature Limited 2019
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. Keywords Older people · Frail · Housing · Neighbourhood · Health · Single
Planning and design for the vulnerable This paper lays out a conundrum. In many locations around the world older people want to stay in their current homes, to “age in place,” even as challenges of self-care, mobility, and household management increase with age (Roy et al. 2018). Government policies support aging in place as an alternative to more expensive institutional care, such as in nursing homes. However, very often older adults’ current homes are not designed to support advanced old age, nor are they located to easily provide support and services. Increasingly older people are living alone, further complicating the * Ann Forsyth [email protected] Jennifer Molinsky [email protected] 1
Department of Urban Planning and Design, Harvard GSD, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
2
Joint Center for Housing Studies, 1 Bow Street, 4th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
3
International Studies Program, Hope College, 126 East 10th Street, Holland, MI 49423, USA
tasks of care and support. This paper sets out the scope of the coming challenge, outlines the range of existing innovations, and proposes a set of roles for those in urban design (broadly defined). Growth in older populations, particularly among those who experience physical and cognitive impairments and who live alone, will challenge urban planners and urban designers to create homes and neighborhoods that suppor
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