The Environmental Design Research Association advances and disseminates behavior and design research toward improving understanding of the relationships between people and their environments. Read More
The Environment-Gerontology Network is focused on how
the physical environment, built and natural, interacts with the lives of older
adults. The network includes researchers, design professionals, and others
interested in how older persons can benefit from improved environmental planning
and design, at all levels of scale.
Want a better city? Make sure it's age-friendly
In: The Star.com
By: Royson James
"Is Toronto an age-friendly city?
If everyone from age 8 to 88 feels equally safe and welcome at the intersection of Yonge and Bloor, the answer is yes.
If older residents are warehoused in seniors buildings, separated, in fact, from residents of all ages, the answer might be no.
Special transit service gets you to first base. A discount transit pass gets you to second. A Calgary-type senior’s pass that charges $100 a year compared to the TTC’s $100 a month is a resounding triple. But safe, reliable, frequent, affordable and accessible transit service gets you home.
But consider this. In a superbly integrated city where older residents feel very comfortable navigating all the services and relations needed for full citizenship, transit assumes less importance; and walking a lot more."
Call for Papers: Journal of Housing for the Elderly
CALL FOR PAPERS
Journal of Housing for the Elderly
Announces a Special Issue:
Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities
Special Issue Editor: Stacey Grant-Savela, Ph.D.
Deadline for Abstracts: January 31, 2010
Naturally occurring retirement communities (NORCs) are places where a high percentage of older residents live, even though they were not initially planned or marketed with older adults in mind. Since its formal inception in the mid-1980s, NORC has come to be used as an umbrella term and what constitutes a NORC has evolved over time based on the work of researchers, agencies, and policymakers. NORCs vary in terms of location (e.g., urban, rural, suburban areas), scale of the setting (e.g., apartment building, neighborhood), population size, evolution (e.g., aging in place, migration of younger residents), physical and social characteristics, and whether or not formal service programs are included. Although NORCs are one of the most prevalent forms of residential place types for older adults in the United States, relatively little is known about life inside a NORC or how NORCs will impact the housing landscape for older adults.
A Special Issue on “Age and the Cultivation of Place”
Issue Editors: David J. Ekerdt and Keith Diaz Moore, University of Kansas
Among the many settings in which people encounter the material world, none are as meaningful as the places where they dwell—residences, sites, and neighborhoods. The meaning of these locales is less ready-made than cultivated over time as people form attachments to the settings of everyday life. In selecting, furnishing, modifying, and personalizing these environments, they “make themselves at home.”
This special issue of the Journal of Aging Studies welcomes scholarship about the intersection of living spaces and their inhabitants, with a focus upon age-related dimensions of this relation. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
Practices and processes: residential decision-making, settling in, use and optimizations of space, leave taking, estrangement, migration, privacy maintenance.
Physical settings: designs, features, arrangements, attributes, and amenities of environments that encourage attachment to place, or discourage it.
Agents of cultivation: specialists, family members, and organizations that manage the fit of people and place across age.
Contributions from social, behavioral and health sciences, architecture, planning and design are encouraged. Research, theory, and policy articles are appropriate.
Deadline: The editors request a 1,000-word extended abstract by January 4, 2010. Selected authors will be invited to submit full manuscripts by October 1, 2010. Extended abstracts should be sent electronically to David Ekerdt,
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, or Keith Diaz Moore,
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.
The Journal of Aging Studies features scholarly papers offering new interpretations that challenge existing theory and empirical work. Articles need not deal with the field of aging as a whole, but with any defensibly relevant topic pertinent to the aging experience and related to the broad concerns and subject matter of the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities. The journal emphasizes innovations and critique - new directions in general - regardless of theoretical or methodological orientation or academic discipline. Critical, empirical, or theoretical contributions are welcome.
Speaking Opportunities at EFA.08
The Environment for Aging Conference calls itself "the industry's
only professional conference of its kind that focuses on the entire spectrum of
senior living in the active baby boom generation. The conference is produced in
association with The Center for Health Design and the City of Baltimore's
Commission on Aging and Retirement Education (CARE)" and is designed to educate
government and private sector stakeholders about planning and design of
next-generation elder-friendly environments. It will be held from March 18-19, 2008
at the JW Marriott Starr Pass Resort & Spa in Tucson, Arizona.
Susan Rodiek
Department of Architecture
Center for Health Systems and
Design
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX
77843-3137
(979) 862-2234 rodiek@tamu.edu
