Funder: CEC-H2020-MSCA-RISE
Duration: 01 October 2015 to 29 November 2018
Staff Involved: Prof N Hewitt, Dr C Brandoni
The EU has to face many challenges in achieving a more balanced regional development and sustainable economic recovery. Many of those challenges have to do with an ageing population trend, urbanization and environment under distress. More liveable and efficient communities is a target to be reached in Europe, where the “silver hair” trends can become a challenging opportunity, from a social, economic and cultural perspective. Despite those challenges are strongly interlinked, solutions provided in urban contexts not often pay due attention to the social process underlying urban trends and to the needs and behaviour of elderly citizens. GRAGE intended to fill this gap, to promote an active, harmonious and inclusive citizenship for elderly people living in urban contexts. The consortium gathered ground-breaking expertise from different scientific background (legal, economic, humanities, engineering), from academic and non-academic institutions, belonging to several countries (from EU and Ukraine). Using a mix of methodologies, the research and innovation programme of the project evolved around the idea of citizenship as a collector of interest, healthy environment and suitable urban solutions for an aging society. The main themes were green buildings, food and urban agriculture and information and language technology.