Experimenting a Healthy Ageing Community in Immersive Virtual Reality Environment: The Case of World's Longest-lived Populations

The ageing of the population in developed countries asks for smart solutions to promote seniors' inclusion in society. Therefore, how to shape a place that is both smart and encourages healthy ageing is a key question in the field of shaping smart and inclusive living environments. Smart placemaking, i.e. the augmentation of physical place with location-specific digital services, offers a range of powerful opportunities to add value to public spaces in ways which can translate into health promotion in society and improved living environments for all. In order to successfully shape a healthy ageing living environment through smart placemaking, one could learn from the experience of successful practices of existing healthy communities. An example of such communities can be Blue Zones which are home for the world's longest-lived populations[1]. This paper aims to integrate the process of smart placemaking with learnings from socio-spatial characteristics of Blue Zones in a neighbourhood-scale environment, i.e. Malvalaan, in The Netherlands. This integration will be presented in the form of proposing urban and architectural design interventions. The process of integration will be experimented in an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) environment. This paper reports on the feedback received from the participants (inhabitants of the Malvalaan) of the experiment which can lead to a better understanding of the proposed design interventions and, consequently, can help to provide better place-based architectural and urban design guidelines.