Built and technological environment

Overview

An important aspect of active ageing is the physical-spatial-technical environment people live in. The physical-spatial-environment includes private living units, neighbourhoods, retirement communities, public transport and communication technology.

This listing covers a broad variety of different areas; within this research field we concentrated on three of them: information and communication technology (ICT), housing and mobility.

Our main focus lied on identifying promising and innovative approaches, which benefit both the living conditions of people and the prospects of relevant business firms and sectors. Activity focused on five different European countries: Finland, Germany, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom. Each country stands for a specific institutional profile and development path in insofar this selection of countries can cover a lot of Europe’s variety and offer the potential to learn from diversity.

As a result we:

• Provided trend monitoring for each of the named countries covering the three sectors.

• Analysed ten case studies of best-practice examples for each topic (thirty in total), generating recommendations for economic, political and public stakeholders.

• Prepared an international workshop, which included members from Asian countries (Japan and South Korea), the US and Canada.

• Conducted trend reports for each of these topics.

The Innovations section contains details of social innovations related to this research field. They were collected as part of an overarching task exploring the potential for social innovation to support active and healthy ageing undertaken as part of the Active and healthy ageing as an asset research field.