PhD Seminar — CO-CREATING A NATURALLY OCCURRING RETIREMENT COMMUNITY

Seminar

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Date

29 May 2024
Organiser

PolyU Design
Time

16:00 - 18:00
Venue

Zoom

Speaker

Alan Lewis

Summary

As the UK's population ages, scarce resources hamper efforts to meet the growing demand for specialist older-people's housing. In consequence, many older occupants will continue to live in general needs housing. There is therefore a need to develop innovative programmes that support ageing in place, enabling older occupants to live healthier lives for longer. The Age-friendly Cities movement has called for such initiatives to be co-produced, enabling older occupants to shape schemes that support people to remain in their homes and communities as they age. This seminar will draw on the initial findings of the ongoing research project, "Co-creating age-friendly social housing," funded by the Dunhill Medical Trust. Specifically, it will focus on efforts to establish a Naturally Occurring Retirement Community (NORC) in an existing social-housing high-rise block, in inner-city Manchester. NORC programmes centre on the integration of health and social support into residential environments that naturally contain a high proportion of older adults. The research project uses a Participatory Action Research framework. The seminar will include reflection on the use of co-production methods and explore the suitability of non-specialist housing to support the needs of older occupants.

All PolyU PhD students and SD staff are welcome.
This Zoom meeting accommodates 100 participants at most.
Event registration is required and on a first-come, first-served basis.
Successful registrants will receive a confirmation email with the Zoom meeting details before the event.

Keynote Speaker

Alan Lewis

Head of Architecture, School of Environment, Education and Development, University of Manchester

Dr Alan Lewis has completed a number of research projects, including "Daylighting in Older People's Housing" funded by Thomas Pocklington Trust (Principal Investigator), "The Mathematization of Daylighting" funded by the RIBA and Thomas Pocklington Trust (Principal Investigator), and "Care Provision Fit for a Future Climate" funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (Co-investigator). More recently he has worked on the AHRC-funded study, "Pathways, Practices and Architectures: Containing Antimicrobial Resistance in the Cystic Fibrosis Clinic (PARC)" (Co-investigator). He was appointed as Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Manchester in 2015. Dr Lewis's research centres on the implications of an ageing population for housing, exploring how health and wellbeing can be enhanced through appropriate design.