Co-Creating Age-Friendly Social Housing: Improving experiences of ageing in place through community collaboration

The World Health Organization’s (WHO) Age-friendly Cities and Communities model calls for older people to be ‘actively involved, valued and supported’ in creating fulfilling places to live, supported by cross-sectoral collaboration to address the multi-faceted challenges that older people experience. Research has highlighted the challenges of enacting this on the ground, particularly in minoritised and marginalised communities, given the barriers to civic participation resulting from multiple levels of economic and social exclusion. Housing associations are an important stakeholder in the Age-Friendly Cities and Communities movement in the UK. Over half of the socially rented properties in England and Wales have an older person (50+) living in them, many of whom experience significant challenges because of economic, social and health inequalities. This has led many housing associations to rethink how they can support their older tenants, beyond the immediate home environment. The National Housing Federation argues that housing associations have “…a key role in shifting the policy agenda from dependence to prevention, from paternalism to choice and independence” (National Housing Federation, 2016). This project aims to explore how older people, housing associations, academics, and other stakeholders, can come together to develop novel, place-based age-friendly initiatives. The study aimed to address the following questions: How can age-friendly programmes respond to the lived experiences of older tenants? What are the processes through which residents and housing associations can co-create age-friendly programmes, recognising the different powers and constraints on each party? How can co-produced age-friendly initiatives address different experiences of spatial exclusion, as a result of gentrification, social isolation and discrimination?