Homes4Life contributed to the development of a European certification scheme for housing, ensuring suitability + adaptability to people’s needs and preferences to age in place
> Timeline: 01 December 2018 – 28 February 2021
> Key Words: #housing #age-friendly #certification
Context
Our living environments have a tremendous impact on our health and wellbeing. Ensuring their suitability and adaptability to people’s needs and preferences – including when these needs and preferences evolve over time – is one of the most effective approaches to respond to challenges brought to us by Europe’s ageing demographics. However, a huge share of the building stock is not adapted to permit to older persons to age in place.
Objective
Homes4Life addresses this challenge by contributing to the development of a new European certification scheme. The scheme will be based on an inspirational and realistic long-term vision of people’s needs and requirements in a holistic life-course approach and help develop better living environments integrating construction and digital solutions where this is beneficial.
AGE involvement
AGE will produce a report on how age-friendly housing in Europe currently looks like and how it will evolve until 2040. This prospective exercise will aim at mapping what could be the future living environments and how they could best help ageing at home. This research report will build on consultations of a wide range of stakeholders including AGE members and the European Covenant on Demographic Change.
AGE will participate in the vast majority of project activities to ensure older persons’ views are taken on board and will be actively contributing to the establishment and management of the Homes4Life stakeholder’s community of interest.
Partners
The project is run by a multidisciplinary group of nine partners from five EU countries under the coordination of TECNALIA (Spain). The consortium grasps expertise from:
- Four research centers and universities: TECNALIA (Spain), TNO (Netherlands), Utrecht University (Netherlands), Universita Politecnica Delle Marche (Italy)
- A certification body: Certivéa (France) and its subsidiary Cerway, operator of the HQE1 certification in Europe
- An SME focused on innovation and technology transfer: R2M Solution (France)
- Three European associations representative of key stakeholders (Belgium): ECTP – the European Construction, built environment and energy efficient buildings Technology Platform, AGE Platform Europe – the voice of older persons in Europe, EUROCARERS – the European Association working for informal carers.
Useful links
- Website: www.homes4life.eu
- Twitter account: @Homes4LifeH2020
- Contact persons: Nhu Tram
