What is the role of the built environment in improving health and wellbeing for our ageing society?

Cities are byzantine places, from the vast metropolises of London, New York, and Paris, to the ‘most liveable’ of Melbourne or Vienna. They bring together dense and diverse collections of people, buildings, streets, transport, wealth, poverty, entertainment, work and lifestyles.

But two big challenges face our cities: the growing trend to urbanisation and the fact that people are living longer. Both issues will have huge impacts on our ageing population and cannot be ignored if we are to create sustainable urban environments for all.

"Two big challenges face our cities: the growing trend to urbanisation and the fact that people are living longer."

According to the United Nations, these demographic trends will be among the “most significant” social transformations facing the modern era, impacting nearly all countries. The proportion of citizens living in urban areas is expected to increase by nearly two-thirds by 2050, and is widely recognised as an immense additional pressure on capacity to sustain the urban environment and infrastructure.

So what is the role of research?

There is an opportunity to apply multi-disciplinary research to influence the design of the built environment, and encourage mobility and socialisation. The ARCC network has been working with researchers and practitioners to synthesise across this research to provide stakeholders with useful material to draw from in their decision-making.

Our recently launched synthesis is available as an online resource (opens new window) or as a downloadable pdf.  Through a combined effort from over 50 researchers and practitioners in the built environment sector, these eight research projects are now spread across six decision-making areas:

• Understanding behaviour and the impact of perception
• Accommodation and care futures
• The importance of choice – co-design
• Transport
• Green spaces
• Technology/toolkits

Through the process of synthesising this research and involving stakeholders, we asked questions around how people find useful research, what are the constraints on accessing researching, and also how to ensure research is communicated in the language required by stakeholders.

By working together, connections between the research themes revealed themselves to both researchers and stakeholders. One of the connections we found when looking at co-design and the importance of perception, a priority consideration is to include the lived experience of our ageing population, that perhaps they are not vulnerable but resilient as a result of their life events.

This work does not replace the important detail to be found within these research projects but it does give the headline findings to cover the vast array of considerations when looking at improving health and wellbeing for an ageing population.