Keywords: N.A.
With the increasing elderly population worldwide, the concept of ‘active ageing’ becomes more
important. This concept implies that health, participation and quality of life should be optimized
in the third age. This is not only important within the homes where older people live, but in
their whole living environment. As individuals age, new physical and social needs emerge. First
of all, the ageing process may reduce their functional capacity resulting in everyday tasks like
grocery shopping becoming a challenge. Besides the physical needs, smaller social network
due to, among other things, retirement, may result in loneliness and connected social needs.
Within the current built environment, these specific needs that come with the ageing process,
are not integrated sufficiently yet, and thus there arises a research question of: How can the
design of existing public spaces be improved to stimulate daily outside activity of older people,
based on their preferences of physical and social needs?
To answer the research question, first an elaborated literature review was conducted on the
physical and social needs of older people and how these are currently integrated in public
space design. When discussing the physical needs, a scale from physical accessible to physical
comfortable attributes of public space was suggested in this thesis. Physical accessibility refers
to issues like height differences, pathway deformations, obstructions and lack of resting points,
that might prevent older people from utilizing a public space. Physical comfort refers to those
attributes that reduce comfort and might make seniors more reluctant to enter a public space,
such as perceived safety or atmosphere. When discussing the social needs, a scale from social
interactive to social emotional attributes of public space was suggested in this thesis. Social
interactive public space design can help reduce loneliness as social interaction is stimulated.
For social emotional public space design, the concept of ‘restoration’ is important. Stressful
or busy situations, such as every-day life work or other activities can cause mental fatigue, as
one constantly has to force him/herself to pay attention. A restorative environment reduces
this mental fatigue. Nature is one of those environments that has high restorative value, and
has proven to reduce stress and improve mental wellbeing.
To find out which attributes of the public spaces, physical or social emotional, are most effective
in stimulating outside activity of older people in existing built environment, a stated choice
experiment was executed. More than 400 Dutch people aged 65 and over, have participated
in an online experiment, selecting between alternative routes to take when walking to the
supermarket or when walking for recreation. The routes varied on 5 attributes: (i) the length of
the walk, later used to define the willingness to walk; (ii) 3 physical attributes namely; pathway
type, pathway width, and presence of bench on the route, and (iii) a social-emotional attribute
of a green restorative environment.
Since it might be difficult to imagine what the combination of certain attributes might look like
in real life, visualizations were used to describe the routes. One of the most important aspects
while creating the images was to make each of the attributes as prominent as the others, so
there is no bias in level of importance. This was done using photo-realistic images, as input
from seniors themselves showed that those were easiest and quickest to understand.
Different econometric models (multinomial logit, latent class, OLS, etc.) were estimated to
analyse the outcomes of the experiment. Results suggest that the green restorative environment
has a high importance for older people; if a route goes through a green environment, seniors
are on average willing to walk an extra 10 minutes. For the physical attributes, pathway type
was found most important, in which a smooth regular surface like asphalt resulted in a higher
willingness to walk of 10 minutes. Results showed further a high degree of heterogeneity within
the group of older people. Especially those seniors that have any type of mobility restriction or
those that face loneliness or low life satisfaction are less willing to walk and prefer relatively
shorter distances. The optimization of physical attributes could increase the willingness
to walk, especially with the addition of benches or the green environment. However, more
research is needed to find out what the effect of a restorative environment is for this specific
group of people.
Finally, the insights from the research were processed into a toolbox that can be used to evaluate
and optimize current walking routes for older people. The toolbox can be seen as an extension
of the toolbox suggested by Ossokina and Jurgenhake (2021) in their paper ‘Inclusive public
spaces for happy senior living’.
Future research might expand the current set of attributes by also including physical comfortable
needs and social interactive needs that were researched in the literature review. Furthermore,
restoration in the built environment could be studied in more detail, as not much is known yet
about the restorative value of other attributes such as entropy, flow of people, or street art
for example. Finally, the heterogeneity of the elderly target group needs further investigation,
especially by doing more research on the needs and preferences of elderly with physical and
social impairments.