‘Age-Friendly Edition’ of the Building Social Connections toolkit
Designing multi-unit housing to support wellbeing at all ages and life stages.
Homes can be designed to support wellbeing at all ages and life stages. Happy Cities and Hey Neighbour Collective recently published an Age-Friendly Edition of our earlier Building Social Connections toolkit, compiling best practices and design ideas for multi-unit homes that meet diverse and changing needs over time, so that people can build long-lasting, supportive relationships in their communities.
Happy Cities and Hey Neighbour Collective collaborated on the vision for these toolkits, building on project learnings and prior research, policy, and engagement by each organization. HappyCities led research, writing, and design of the toolkit, with detailed content review and collaboration from Hey Neighbour Collective. They were produced as part of an ongoing collaborative project that we call Housing That Connects Us.
Context
In just over 40 years from now (2068), more than one in four people in Canada will be 65 or older. Surveys repeatedly find that the vast majority of older adults want to stay in their homes for as long as possible. However, many homes are not built to meet changing needs as people age. Inadequate design can cause health, safety, and accessibility challenges. Others would like to downsize into a smaller home, but cannot always find affordable, desirable options that will meet their needs as they age, and that foster a strong sense of community.
The design of our homes and neighbourhoods influences how likely we are to feel lonely or isolated. About one in 10 Canadians aged 65 and older report feeling socially isolated, and one in four report low social participation, according to a 2022 report from the National Institute on Ageing. Socially connected neighbours are healthier, more resilient, and often able to stay longer in their home and community as they age.
Of course, people can feel lonely and isolated at any age, and social connections with neighbours have proven benefits for all of us. The design ideas in the Age-Friendly Edition of the toolkit aim to support wellbeing at all stages of life—but particularly for older adults—while accounting for diverse incomes, abilities, and life experiences. When multi-unit housing communities are designed to support aging in place, they nurture long-term, intergenerational relationships, building resilience and connections across all ages.
The Building Social Connections Toolkit
Over 2023 and 2024, Happy Cities, Hey Neighbour Collective, and researchers from Simon Fraser University worked together with five local municipalities and one First Nation to co-create new policies to encourage sociable multi-unit housing design.
Building on the learnings from this project, Happy Cities and Hey Neighbour Collective published a design toolkit of evidence-based strategies to nurture social wellbeing in multi-unit housing. The design principles and actions equip policymakers, planners, designers, and community members to build and advocate for more socially connected, inclusive communities, drawing on over a decade of research and engagement with residents and housing industry actors, including non-profit housing providers, city planners, architects, and market developers.
About the Age-Friendly Edition
The age-friendly edition supplements the Building Social Connections toolkit and outlines design best practices for enabling aging in the right place.
This edition considers multi-unit housing forms from townhomes to low-, medium-, and high-rise apartments. Many of the design principles and actions apply to both new and existing buildings; however, some must be considered at the start of the development process.
This toolkit is for anyone interested in or working in housing, community planning, and development, with a focus on designing homes that meet the needs of older adults and support residents to age in the right place.
The actions are intended for:
- Planners and planning consultants
- Architects and designers
- Market and non-market housing developers and operators
- All levels of government involved in housing
- Individual residents and community groups, or advocates
Research precedents for this work
In 2023, in partnership with Hey Neighbour Collective, Happy Cities and researchers from the Simon Fraser University Department of Gerontology developed a building audit tool to assess the capacity of buildings to support aging in the right place. Twenty different buildings,
operated by Concert Properties and Brightside Community Homes Foundation, were studied in Vancouver and Victoria, B.C. A large proportion of Brightside residents are older adults, in addition to families and people with disabilities. All buildings assessed in this study were rental buildings, with a mix of market, below-market, and deeply affordable non-market housing.
This research included:
- Audits of the built environment, scoring different categories of spaces within a building
- Behavioural mapping, observing types and frequencies of social interaction in shared spaces
- Focus groups with residents, asking about the most important spaces in their homes and how they connect with neighbours
- Interviews with building staff and management, asking about their goals and strategies to promote social interaction and aging in the right place
The design actions and ideas in the Age-Friendly Edition build on the findings from this research.
For more information, visit the Happy Cities website to read the ‘Aging in the right place: Designing housing for wellbeing and older adults‘ report.
