Certification scheme encourages age-friendly housing A accreditation scheme that recognises buildings adapted and equipped for active ageing could help ensure that Europe’s housing stock is fit for our ageing population. Society © Phovoir, Shutterstock Age-friendly home environments that take the needs of older people fully into account can play a key role in helping to maintain independence and physical and mental health into old age. “Living environments should respect the lifestyle choices, needs and preferences of people regardless of their age,” says Homes4Life project coordinator Silvia Urra Uriarte from the Building Technologies Division of TECNALIA, Spain. “Unfortunately, the current European housing stock is not fit for this purpose. This means that it can be difficult to age well at home, if that is our desire.” Urra points out that less than 1 % of buildings in Spain are completely accessible for all. At the European level, around 8 % of over-65-year-olds report a lack of heating or cooling facilities to keep a comfortable temperature at home. “Such barriers make it impossible to enjoy a good quality of life at home as we age,” she adds. Independent living at home The goal of the Homes4Life project was to find new ways of providing European citizens with better choices for independent living at home. This was achieved by supporting a full range of digital opportunities, and identifying investments needed to update Europe’s built environment. Central to the project’s vision was the establishment of a certification scheme. “To begin, the project analysed different age-friendly housing contexts across Europe, and identified existing innovative initiatives,” explains Urra. “We also focused on developing a working definition of what it means for a home to be age-friendly.” The project then analysed existing certification and labelling schemes, as well as research and innovation projects around the topic of age friendliness, ICT and construction. “We tried to focus, in a more practical way, on what a living environment should be,” she notes. “One of the key successes of this project was being able to integrate into the consortium different profiles and backgrounds. These profiles included older people, carers, private companies, research centres and universities. Age friendliness is an intersectoral issue, and having many different sectors represented really helped.” Encouraging age-friendly housing Out of this collaborative work, a document called Homes4Life 2040 was developed. This outlines a future vision for the sector, and provides guidelines and tools to support age-friendly policies. This includes the integration of age-friendly construction and digital solutions, where this is beneficial. The document also looks at ways of creating businesses in the active ageing sector. “The European dimension of the project was critical to ensuring that the results can be applied to a wide range of contexts,” adds Urra. In addition to the vision document, the project successfully developed the Homes4life Certification Scheme. This new initiative for encouraging age-friendly housing across Europe is based on the project’s long-term vision of people’s needs and requirements. The certification scheme has been successfully tested on 11 pilot buildings across Europe (Spain, France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland) in both the design and the operational phases. “Next steps include continuing to disseminate and share the Homes4Life vision, and to conduct further research on these topics,” she says. “We also want to finalise the certification scheme, with the aim of launching it onto the market.” The aim is that this certification scheme will take into account the specificities of each country, and apply to both new and existing buildings. Ultimately, establishing Europe-wide certification for ageing-friendly housing could provide the critical incentive to delivering smarter age-friendly building stock. Keywords Homes4Life, ageing, lifestyle, building, health, digital, construction, age-friendly