Abstract

Planning for Well-being in Aging
Track: Urban and Regional Planning
Authors: Amber Joplin

According to a recent AARP survey, "eighty-nine percent of Americans want to stay as long as possible in their current houses." However, the current built environment does not support the growing number of increasingly fragile individuals either in their homes, or in the community. Planners and policy makers are challenged to advance infrastructure supporting aging as part of their comprehensive and inclusive planning strategy. This session introduces a project on sustainable aging that employs GIS to identify systemic relationships between the environment and well being in aging. Individual, social, built, and natural contexts derived from the literature of gerontology, health, environmental sciences are employed as a theoretical framework supporting well being in aging. Areas within the City of Spokane are identified where elder residents should report higher levels of well-being. A survey is used to test the accuracy of the theoretical model.