Grant: Knowledge Synthesis Grant - PA: Age-Supportive Built Environment

Recent evidence has highlighted a relationship between seniors' mobility and built environment; the built environment includes features of towns and cities including the location of houses, shopping centres, community facilities and streets. However, this is a complex interaction dependent on many person-level and community-level factors. Although evidence is emerging in this area, to our knowledge there has not been a comprehensive knowledge synthesis published to determine the intersection between seniors' health and their participation in their community. Therefore, we propose to systematically search the published peer-reviewed and grey literature (e.g. technical reports, working papers etc.) to find information on the association between three main areas- seniors' physical mobility; the social environment; and the built environment (areas outside of the home). In addition, we propose a symposium to bring together key target groups (seniors, planners and health researchers) to give future direction in this area. We anticipate that our synthesis will be a framework for developing a seniors' specific lens on the contributing role of the built environment on the health of our aging population.