Growing old in the neighbourhood

The epidemiologist Zhen Du followed 3,171 Yokohama residents aged 65 and over from 2016 to 2020 to see what a citywide walking-points programme did. Participants walked 6.83 minutes more a day and had a 21% lower risk of social isolation. The effect was not the same for everyone, and the differences are where the built environment enters: people on low incomes and people living near a park were less likely to become homebound, and men, people with less education and people in denser areas showed lower isolation risk than their counterparts.

The landscape researcher Xi Sophie Chen reviewed 37 studies published between 1989 and 2020 in which the neighbourhood was the exposure and cognition or dementia the outcome. Neighbourhood resources and green space were the most studied. The link showed up most clearly for global cognition, memory and dementia, and physical activity mediated it. It was stronger among older women and among people with disabilities or lower socioeconomic status. Xi Sophie Chen rates the evidence as moderate, and asks for longitudinal measures of the environment rather than snapshots.

The urban planning researcher Yafei Yue surveyed 879 people aged 60 and over in Dalian and separated the environment as measured from the environment as perceived. Access to everyday services went with better mental wellbeing, but through the perceived environment rather than directly. A dense street interface ran the other way. Varied leisure, exercise and landscape facilities, underground parking and lifts in the building all went with better wellbeing. The pattern held after excluding people who had chosen their address deliberately. Without that exclusion a cross-section cannot separate the address from the person who picked it.

The architecture researcher Jenny Roe took eleven older adults out of an independent living facility and had them walk two routes near their homes on separate days, in randomised order, wearing a smart watch and carrying air quality and noise sensors. One route was 89% grey infrastructure, the other 59%. Happiness rose and stress physiology improved on the greener route at p below 0.05. Reaction times were faster afterwards too, but not significantly so with eleven people. When drawing the route from memory, participants leaned on natural features to describe it wherever there were any.

The geographer Jessica Finlay interviewed 38 people aged 55 to 92 in subsidised housing and homeless shelters in Minneapolis, seated and walking. Finlay names four qualities of a good place to grow old: safety and comfort, access to services, social connection and stimulation. Attachment was not available to everyone in the sample. Among people living with crime, health hazards and no supportive infrastructure, being attached to the place meant staying where those were.

Du followed 3,171 people for four years, the only prospective study here. Chen reviewed other people’s work and rated the evidence moderate. Yue and Finlay both worked with cross-sections, and Roe’s crossover had eleven people, seven of them with a registered disability.