Towards a healthy city: urban and architectural strategies for age-friendly design

The main challenges that today’s metropolises have to face, in addition to an often-unregulated urban growth, concern the progressive aging of the world’s population. This article proposes an evaluation and support tool for age-friendly design based on integrating the certification system, combined with a predictive approach that characterizes Digital Twins. The goal is to transform a city segment from a Smart to Healthy City, where technology will continuously improve the physical and social environments. A model structured in this way and highlighting its physical discontinuities at the urban level allows simulating interventions to make them safer and respond on time to the deficiencies in the preventive assessment phase. A virtual functionalized urban sector will be obtained, offering safe roadways and green spaces and adequate services to avoid the concentration of specific activities in the same areas (commerce, education, health services). The innovative aspect of the research is the multidimensional approach, which allows you to combine the potential of digital models made in Building Information Modeling (BIM) environment with the Geographic Information System (GIS), further integrated with the Age-friendly system of evaluation and certification, which are an articulate and valid tool to support decision-making processes to design places on a human scale. This tool can also be helpful in the context of the health emergency we are experiencing due to the pandemic, which has placed an urgent need to rethink urban spaces to promote a greater sense of tranquillity, safety, and liveability. The purpose is to manage the flow of entry and exit from places of aggregation, imagining structures that can transform themselves when necessary and act as strategic support to health facilities. As a case study for the evaluation of the peculiarities of living spaces and social contexts, it was chosen the Balduina district, an urban area of Rome.