ASUVA – New housing options in old age / Outi Jolanki
Globally and nationally one of the central questions at the heart of modern politics and policies is to how best support wellbeing of older people and meet their housing and care needs in the future. Housing, living environment and social relations has been shown to have central meaning for wellbeing and functional ability. On the other hand, it has been shown that to strengthen a sense of community and community participation is one important way to promote wellbeing of residents of all ages.
The central goal of the ASUVA-project was to map international and national innovative housing models, which promote a sense of community and community participation including models which combine housing and care. We were particularly interested in how different models promote well-being of residents of all ages. Another important aim was to find out how different models meet housing and care needs of older people who have different resources such as people with low income or people with memory illness.
New information was collected from the actors of public sector, private sector, third sector and residents themselves through questionnaires, group discussions and interviews. Within the project we created a final report with description of case studies and a literature review to be used in housing and care policies and in designing housing and living areas. A summary of project results was made publicly available to enable distributing information on different housing and living options to organizations and ordinary citizens.
Key concepts: housing, living area, living environment, a sense of community, well-being, community participation, age-friendly, ageing, housing services, residential care, dementia, community care, communal living
Funding
Prime Minister’s Office (VN-TEAS) Duration of the project is 6/2016 – 2/2017.
Research group
Principal Investigator
Outi Jolanki, PhD, Adjunct Professor (The Title of Docent in Social Gerontology), outi.jolanki@uta.fi
University of Tampere, the School of Health Sciences
Consortium partners
GeroCenter
AgeInstitute
The Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä