From niche level innovations to age-friendly homes and neighbourhoods: a multi-level analysis of challenges, barriers and solutions

Abstract

Age-friendly housing is an envisioned solution to enable people to live longer independently at home, thereby reducing costs of long-term care and responding to the needs and demands of older persons. Although different age-friendly innovations exist, they fail to realise scale beyond the niche level. Based on workshops with stakeholders from different European countries we show that challenges and barriers for scaling-up relate to the unknowns and uncertainties of the culture (age-friendly housing vision), practice (approaches to realise age-friendly housing) and structure (organising and structuring elements) of the age-friendly housing system. Solutions are merely informed by the perspective of the own professional practice and might fail due to their mismatch with other practices and by not considering the resilience of incumbent regimes. Establishing a multi-actor process to start defining the culture, structure and practice might result in a cooperative and distributive effort to realise age-friendly homes and neighbourhoods.