In this video, Philippa Clarke, research professor in ISR’s Survey Research Center, discusses the importance of neighborhood factors in understanding how we can age well.

I do work in understanding aging. In particular, I’m very interested in understanding how people live in their communities and get around in their neighborhoods. 

So my work always integrates neighborhood factors and older people to try and understand how we can have the most age-friendly communities that can support people as they age, so they can still be engaged in society. 

My work is fundamentally driven by the fact that I grew up with a mother who had multiple sclerosis, and as she became progressively more disabled and unable to get around, I figured out, or I saw how she would navigate her community and her environments with those increasing disabilities. 

The way we design our communities is so important for people to continue to engage in their life, go and visit with their friends, get down to the corner and grocery store, even if they are becoming more disabled with aging. 

One of the things that we have done is try to get at the specific features in what we call the built environment, which is, for example, our sidewalks. A classic sidewalk will have a lot of obstacles. The pavement could be uneven, there could be cracks in it. So all those things are actually hazards for older people who have more difficulty walking, lifting up their feet as they take a step. 

So we did a study where we actually put monitors on older people in the community to gather information about how they moved or walked over different features in the sidewalks. And we did see that, yes, when an older adult approaches a sidewalk where it’s uneven because a tree root has been pushing it up, they’ll change their gait, they’ll move around it. We were able to document in real time that these things matter. 

If we don’t look at these things, if we don’t investigate them, we don’t know. We won’t know that curb cuts are important for older people. We won’t know that older people are at risk of tripping and having broken legs if they are actually finding it difficult to navigate over uneven sidewalks. It’s information that is important for helping our society age well. We need to think about how we can support those people and not just put them into nursing homes, but really how can people age in place.