MOBILAGE. Mobility and aging: daily life and welfare supportive networks at the neighborhood level

In a time of aging society and of local welfare policies’ restructuring, significant programs are favoring the development of services supporting “aging in place” versus institutionalized solutions such as nursing homes. A lot is to be investigated to understand how joint innovation in the provision of care services, and in the reorganization of urban living environments may provide quality of life (QofL) and wellbeing to those aging at home. Within this context, the aim of the research is twofold. First it aims at investigating which role local public transport (LPT), and welfare and community services play in improving the QofL of elderly. For this purpose, an analysis of the supply and demand of local public transport (LPT), and of welfare and community services concerning the elderly (people aged 65+, divided into three groups: 65-69; 70-74; 75+), living in the municipality of Milan, is carried out. Second, it aims at providing the public administration with a GIS decision support tool to find out the most appropriate forms of governance to improve and integrate care services for the elderly and urban policy and mobility measures in the city of Milan. The integration of research approaches and policy tools that are developed in the domain of social and healthcare policies with those developed in the domain of urban planning and mobility is relevant to develop an effective integrated and spatially sound governance of welfare and community services. The methodology consists of: (i) an investigation and literature review on the issues concerned with policies aimed at “aging in place” with a focus on the implications in terms of related mobility issues and on the supply and demand of welfare services and community welfare; (ii) data collection on the macro neighborhoods (Nuclei di Identità Locale – NIL) concerning: residential density of elderly, demographic turnover; socio-economic data; functional mix; local public transport (LPT) accessibility index; origin and destination (O/D) matrix of elderly; LPT customer satisfaction for elderly; physical location barriers; use of the bike sharing system by elderly; location and physical and functional characteristics of community welfare services (inclusing bottom-up practices); (iii) a survey addressed to a representative sample of elders living in some selected neighborhoods and aiming at integrating quantitative data with qualitative information on the specific and context related constraints that the elderly experience in their daily life and in the accessibility to welfare services; (iv) monitoring of a group of selected elders in their daily activities using wearable sensors and GPS trackers and combined with diary with a written overview of their activities in order to understand their mobility practices, their satisfaction in using LPT system and welfare services; (iv) the development of a GIS decision support tool for public administrations is to find out the most appropriate forms of governance to improve and integrate care services for the elderly and urban policy and mobility measures in the city of Milan. Besides, the GIS-based supply demand mapping tool is able to determine the impact assessment of different scenarios, by analyzing the relationship between the several social, housing and economic needs of the elderly population and welfare services mainly in terms of accessibility. In other words, the tool will be able to merge the different ageing people’s aspirations together with the physical and functional urban resources through the integration of traditional data as well as techniques (e.g. usual ISTAT data, surveys) with more innovative analysis techniques such as the lessical, network, big data ones, in order to better detect the ageing social demand.