Housing and Urban Life: Lively town centres and quality of life for an ageing population

In rural Denmark, many town centres are under pressure from structural change. This can include the loss of major workplaces and falling property prices, which means that towns are gradually losing their former functions. At the same time, older people make up a growing share of the population.

Boliger og Byliv turns the question around and asks how the two challenges can be considered together: how the spatial qualities of town centres and the everyday lives of older people can enrich one another and generate greater quality of life, health and social cohesion.

The project studies three towns in the municipalities of Kalundborg, Thisted and Tønder through narrative ethnography, situated interviews, socio-spatial analyses and resident involvement. A key approach is a large wooden model of the town centre that older residents themselves can rebuild and reimagine using movable elements such as a church, a bench, a park and a shop window. Engaging workshops give concrete form to residents' visions and form the basis for scenarios for each town – scenarios that point to how town centres facing reinvention can become places of hospitality, community and settlement.

Rather than treating older people as a cost or empty town centres as ready for demolition, the project turns its attention to the resources and connections that emerge in the encounter between town centres and an ageing population with agency, time and drive. Its outcomes include transferable urban-space analyses and scenarios, peer-reviewed articles and a popular-science report that can inspire other municipalities.