The aging of the U.S. population and the rising average life span are transforming current perspectives on growing older, retirement, and senior living communities. To ensure that environments meet the changing needs of older adults, a reconception of housing, communities, and neighborhoods is required. Re-creating Neighborhoods for Successful Aging provides the foundation for confronting this pressing challenge.
Drawing from the fields of gerontology, health sciences, community planning, landscape architecture, and environmental design, this groundbreaking resource provides an in-depth examination of current elder housing practices and strategies, alongside goals for the future. Housing models, such as continuing care retirement communities (CCRCs), shared housing, and co-housing, are evaluated, and best practice recommendations are presented.
Expert contributors also incisively explore interdisciplinary issues including
- the casual relationship between health and the environment
- challenges posed by America’s automobile-dependent suburban communities
- elder-friendly design principles, including universal design and defensible space
- restorative benefits of nature and green environments
- assistive technology that can support older adults’ independence
- retrofitting of naturally occurring retirements communities (NORCs)
The book closes with an inspiring look at opportunities for future collaboration of the health sciences and the planning and design professions for the realization of supportive, life-affirming communities that will result in healthy aging, active living, and continued social participation for older adults.
This compilation of research and practice is a vital tool for gerontologists, public health professionals, senior living administrators, rural and urban planners, architects, landscape architects, and policy makers.
admin – :
“This book promises to be an invaluable resource for anyone working with or interested in issues surrounding aging, universal design, and health care. As a teacher, I would recommend the book to students for its history of long-term care in the United States, its rich resources relating public health to the built environment, and its compilations of the benefits of urban nature. As a community member [sic] I would recommend the book to my city officials for making the connection between public health and the built environment and for its look at alternatives to planned retirement communities. As a practicing professional, I found the entire book informative and valuable for my work with assisted living environments and an aging population…This book is an important resource in an evolving view of landscape architects’ roles in creating environments.”
-Claire Latané, Landscape Architect, EPT Design, Senior Design Studio Teacher, Cal Poly Pomona
admin – :
“When Powell Lawton theorized about the fit between persons and their environments in old age, a new interdisciplinary collaboration arose between psychologists, ecologists, architects, planners, and others whose uniting interest was environmental design. This book follows in that tradition. But now there is a new urgency. The baby boom is retiring and will increasingly press for new and creative approaches to this issue. Re-creating Neighborhoods for Successful Aging is an eagerly awaited volume that speaks to the person environment fit in old age, and does so brilliantly.”
–Charles F. Longino, Jr., Ph.D., Professor of Sociology and Director of the Reynolda Gerontology Program, Wake Forest University
admin – :
“As Americans live longer and longer, what lifestyle options exist beyond nursing homes and other institutional care facilities? This informative book provides some answers: walkable neighborhoods with connections to goods, services, and personal relationships, and refreshing green space among them. Planners, architects and landscape architects, and health care professionals will all benefit from this book.”
–J. William Thompson, FASLA, Editor, Landscape Architecture