Neighborhood effects for aging in place: a transdisciplinary framework toward health-promoting settings

ABSTRACT

The premise of promoting aging in place is that neighborhoods can enhance or protect older adults’ health. But progress toward health-promoting settings has been slow in practice given limited understanding of causal pathways to facilitate targeted interventions in the built and social environment of neighborhoods. This article compares the effects of neighborhood built and social environment on older adults’ physical and psychosocial health by reviewing relevant articles from three interdisciplinary databases. With reference to an Urban Space Framework, 51 relevant articles were analyzed in four categories, each of which compares the significance of two pairs of relationships in the environment and health nexus. Whereas neighborhood social environment has more significant relationship with older adults’ psychosocial health, the findings for neighborhood built environment are mixed. A resultant transdisciplinary framework links the urban design of neighborhoods to older adults’ health via neighborhood social environment and older adults’ psychosocial health, given fulfillment of macro level health prerequisites. The article concludes with a discussion on the utility of the framework to facilitate research on micro level causal pathways from neighborhood built environment to older adults’ health.

KEYWORDS:

• Neighborhood effects
• older adults’ health
• integrative review
• social environment
• built environment

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Dr Mats Lennart Sundin for critical comments on an earlier version of Figure 1, and Zhang Liqing, Dr Cho Im Sik, Assoc. Prof. Fung John Chye, Prof. Jürgen Rosemann, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Rong Yao Gan

Daniel R. Y. Gan is a researcher at the Centre for Ageing Research in the Environment, National University of Singapore.