Our partner AGE Platform – Estelle Huchet and Nhu Tram – presented Homes4Life at the International Social Housing Festival 2019 in Lyon, France.
Read below the pitch of the project prepared by AGE Platform for ISHF 2019 :
What is the purpose of innovations if they cannot be scale up, and make a change in the life of the many? Certification is too often seen as a straightjacket hindering innovation, disregarding local specificities and preventing the development of personalized solutions. The Homes4Life project aims at developing a European certification scheme for ageing in place. Our consortium of nine European partners is grasping expertise from various domains, from architects to social scientists, civil society representatives and engineers. We are studying how to give a boost to the development of housing options that would accommodate our changing lifestyle choices, needs and preferences as we age – so we can stay at home, until the end. A multi-stakeholder cooperation is critical in that context as we want our certification scheme to respect the various cultural contexts and field of work in which it may be implemented. We want people to feel at home, to feel safe, to feel independent at any age. If these feelings may translate into different construction realities, some common grounds start to become known as we travel Europe to exchange with various stakeholders, and interact with different types of households. This conversation will be a governing principle of our project – not for the sake of it, but because it is the only way to ensure our certification scheme strikes the good balance between scaling up innovations, remaining adaptable enough. We are sure you have tons of good ideas; so we invite you to come to us and make sure those do not remain the privilege of a happy few.