Mobility, Mood and Place: Seeking the Views of Older people on Age Friendly Environments

Mobility, Mood and Place is a cross-university collaborative research project which investigates the relationship between older people and the built environment. Three discrete work packages have investigated the age friendly co-design of urban and rural environments, mapped older people’s emotional responses to moving through the city utilising neural imaging technology and ethnographic methods, and studied the effect of particular urban environments on people’s health over a lifetime.
This paper focuses on engaging older people with students of Architecture and Landscape in research activities and co-design exercises based in Copenhagen, Manchester, London and the island of Orkney.
Research methods in the field have engaged participants and students together in filmed ‘walk and talk tours’, photographic survey of people and places, structured interviews and focus groups, mapping and co-design activities. Insights generated have taken analytical, methodological and design based forms. This presentation will focus on design outcomes which contribute to knowledge of what might make places more age-friendly. Themes will include the importance of urban archaeology - responding to older people’s desire to see the older artefacts of the city, including buildings and infrastructure, given new life by propositions which reveal the layers of history of built form as a way of uncovering richer spatial, cultural and social narratives of a longer duration. Other themes will include the importance of increased densities and mixed uses while retaining contact with nature, urban adaptability, the design of public space and the co-dependence of pathway networks and buildings in the age friendly rural landscape.