Design for Life
Our mission
Transforming the lives of older people by strengthening and connecting community action, strategic policy and local planning
USPs
- Leading Global role in developing Age Friendly approaches at regional scale
- Unique emphasis on the contribution of culture and place
- Enduring partnerships: Multi-level, multi-sector & multi-disciplinary
- Extensive record of:
- Empowering engagement with older people
- Intersectional action across private and public sectors (including devolved health and social case, transport, and housing)
- Interdisciplinary collabotation (including design, gerontology, epidemiology, psychologu, data science, geography, community development and health)
Applied: Design for Life
The Greater Manchester Healthy Ageing Ecosystem and its relationship between research, policy and practice are recognised by the World Health Organisation as an international exemplar. The global challenge of health inequity requires us to find ways of simultaneously engaging multiple systems through a wide range of stakeholders across the scales of international governance to local, interpersonal action. Greater Manchester is leading the way in both understanding and action with its enduring efforts around whole system place-based public health interventions addressing health across the life-course.
Design for Life marks an enduring collaboration between National, International and Regional partners to develop approaches to place based public health programmes addressing health inequity across the life course. Using architectural research to convene interdisciplinary expertise and curate partnership working around both policy creation and place planning Design for Life has emerged in order to consolidate and capture the expertise in implementation of ageing in place and age friendly neighbourhood programmes and planning. It is used as an innovation accelerator where prototypes have been designed and tested and then implemented in different contexts and translated into tools and guidance.
Design for life is a partnership with the GM Ageing Hub and Pozzoni Archtiects but involved wider collaborations with LA partners across the NW region, national charities such as the Centre for Ageing Better and the below organisations:
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Rightsizing: Reframing older people’s housing choices
The rightsizing project responded to the observation that a potentially very large number of older people were living in unsuitable accommodation for later life or had an expressed preference to move home but very few (<4%) every year did actually move house and of those less than half moved into smaller properties i.e it is…
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Manchester Age Friendly Neighbourhoods
The Manchester Age Friendly Neighbourhoods project explored the systematic implementation of the Old Moat Age Friendly Neighbourhood prototype for co-produced place-based urban planning for health across the life course through creating 5 resident led multi-stakeholder age friendly partnerships in deprived wards across Manchester City.
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The Life of the City: Manchester City Centre as an age friendly neighbourhood
This project was commissioned by Manchester City Council to explore how the Manchester city centre operates as a place to live for older people, investigating what ‘neighbourhoods’ exist and what they are like.