Flexible and Enriched Environments for Senior Living and Aging-in-Place in Dense Urban Environments

Abstract

Aging is not a static state; it is an evolving one with each one of us on the aging spectrum. Senior living environments must respond to an evolving spectrum in terms of physical, cognitive, social, and sensory needs. To do so, they must be flexible at multiple levels: versatile, to provide a range of options; modifiable, to allow users to change the environment as needed; convertible, to allow owner/operators to change the facility in response to changing demographics; and scalable, allowing all stakeholders to grow (or shrink) programs and facilities as needed. In this chapter, we will share the research framework of enriched environments and flexible facilities and illustrate the principles through a robust case study that was built in a dense urban neighborhood. The Vista at CC Young is a senior living facility, designed by global architecture firm HKS, that consolidated all licensed care into one contiguous, ten-story complex devoted to specific and/or shared uses. Some of the levels are designed with pairs of flexible small households to support resident aging-in-place, adapt to changing senior needs, and reassign state licenses for each individual household to respond to unknown challenges in the future.