Built Environment and Community Health Centres for Healthy and Inclusive Ageing

The aims of this contribution are based on some premises: the recent demographic and epidemiological transition, with the consequent need to optimize the opportunities for an aging population; the reorganization of health services to respond to this transition by strengthening local services; the impact of the built environment on health, in terms of access to health services but also as an opportunity to foster health promotion and the prevention of chronic diseases. The objective of the paper is to set a state of the art on the topic of the relationship between environmental determinants and health indicators for an healthy and inclusive aging, and propose an interdisciplinary approach to face this issue in a local context. The local context, ie the size of the neighborhood and its community, is particularly important in addressing the issue of health as it is the scenario in which people live their daily lives. A category of users living the neighborhood with its services more than others do and for whom the built environment and a community perspective become important for the maintenance of a healthy life is the elderly population. In this framework environmental factors, at different scales, can favor health status by offering the possibility of adopting a physically active lifestyle and having a socially active life. It is therefore interesting to understand which factors of the built environment are associated with the health indicators of the elderly population in the neighborhood referring to the organizational model of primary care in Tuscany. An innovative element of the present contribution is the strong interdisciplinary character as it envisages the conception of a unitary approach to the same problem by two different disciplines, namely the architecture and public health represented by the research team.