Designing for Ageing: Aged Care and Seniors Housing

About this course.

Seniors housing is for older Australians across a wide and changing range of needs, from those who are fully independent and simply want a home that suits them as they age, to those who need substantial daily care, and designing well means recognising that "older people" are not a single group but a spectrum. That spectrum runs, broadly, from ageing in place in an ordinary home that has been designed or adapted to remain suitable as needs change; through independent living options such as retirement villages, which offer age-appropriate housing with some shared amenity and services but not high-level care; to residential aged care, which provides accommodation together with personal and clinical care for people who can no longer live independently. Understanding where a project sits on this spectrum, and that residents may move along it over time, is the foundation of good design.

Australia's population is ageing, which is the underlying driver of demand across the whole spectrum. People are living longer, and the proportion of older people in the population is rising, so the need for housing and care that suits older people is growing in both scale and variety. This is not simply a matter of building more of the same; it is a matter of providing a range of options that suit different levels of independence and care, in different locations, at different price points, and with different balances of privacy, community and support. Practitioners working in this field are responding to one of the most significant demographic shifts affecting the built environment, and the quality of what is built will shape the daily lives of very large numbers of people for decades.