CollAge. Collaboratively developing age-friendly communities with municipality eldercare, spatial planning and Senior Citizens’ Councils

This programme is an investigation of cross-sector collaboration between three main actors in the municipality: 1. social services for older people (eldercare); 2. spatial planning, and 3. Senior Citizens’ Councils.

The collaboration between social services and planning is stipulated in the Social Services Act, but the issue has generated very little research.

The research thus aims at exploring how eldercare interventions and services are managed and understood in spatial planning, and how older people’s preferences can contribute to improved quality in services and housing provision.

The ultimate aim of the programme is to develop a methodological tool – CollAge – to support, facilitate and structure collaboration between the three actors.

The theoretical framing of this programme is ‘age-friendly community’, a WHO concept and model for good environments for older people.

A point of departure is that eldercare, spatial planning and older people themselves have overlapping interests in housing and care, and that there lies therein potential to inform the age-friendly community with different viewpoints and knowledge.

In the collaboration, a multidisciplinary team of scholars in social work and spatial planning from Umeå University and Blekinge Institute of Technology explore a variety of practical and discursive aspects of the topic in six different research projects.

With their varied expertise, the researchers provide input to a diverse research agenda with multiple qualitative approaches. A multidisciplinary advisory group of experienced researchers and older people support the research team.

Older people are involved in the research as co-producers, research subjects and advisors, sometimes in several roles at the same time. This constellation is expected to contribute necessary skills and knowledge to the research. Stakeholders – older individuals, organizations and authorities – will be invited to follow the programme.