Longevity Playbook

Mona Vijaykumar AND Kaicheng Zhuang

fall 2025

Aging isn’t just a healthcare issue. It’s also a planning challenge.

While she was growing up in Chennai, India, urban designer Mona Vijaykumar noticed that not everyone could participate in the city’s vibrant urban life. Due to physical barriers like uneven sidewalks and crowded streets, many older adults, including her own grandmother, were often confined indoors. But when she moved to Japan, she experienced a striking contrast: She saw older adults using public transportation, visiting shops, and gathering in public spaces. “That experience helped me realize that withdrawing from public life was not an inevitable part of growing older,” she says. “It’s a consequence of urban design.”

Her colleague Kaicheng Zhuang, also a designer in our Boston studio, had investigated how suburban neighborhoods could adapt to aging populations for his MIT thesis. Through spatial analysis and workshops with older adults, caregivers, and care providers, he explored how housing adaptations could connect with neighborhood amenities and care services to help people age within their communities. Kaicheng’s research resulted in built prototypes in California and is now being scaled to additional sites.

Their shared curiosity became the foundation for “Longevity by Design.” Considering the home as part of a larger network of streets, public spaces, and institutions, they wanted to examine how decisions at each of these scales might support one another, and how aging could be viewed as a fundamental urban design consideration instead of relatively isolated healthcare and accessibility challenges. These questions take on added weight given that 16% of the global population will be over 65 by 2050, and that 68% of the world’s population will live in urban areas.

An interactive tool at multiple scales

Mona and Kaicheng viewed longevity through an urban design lens, examining academic studies, international precedents, demographic trends, and age-friendly planning frameworks, including the World Health Organization’s eight domains of age-friendly communities. Recognizing that older adults are not a homogeneous group, they also explored how the experience of aging differs across urban and suburban contexts. Mona attended the Bloomberg CityLab 2026 summit in Barcelona, and, along with conversations at the summit, she was able to experience firsthand how Barcelona’s public spaces, neighborhood infrastructure, mobility, and everyday social life combine.

As they synthesized these perspectives, one question kept arising: “How do we make this knowledge useful to designers, planners, and communities?” They wanted to create an interactive tool to encourage people to engage with research, question assumptions, and explore different solutions together. They also wanted to encompass a variety of scales, from an individual routine to the systems that support it. They were particularly interested in understanding how housing, mobility, public spaces, social participation, and access to services influence people’s ability to age independently and remain connected to their communities.

That led them to develop the Longevity Playbook, a 52-card participatory design toolkit organized around four planning lenses: policy, program, project, and placemaking.

They translated their research into playing cards that allow participants to respond to real-world planning scenarios by selecting different interventions, discussing priorities, and developing integrated strategies. The format encourages conversations about trade-offs and demonstrates that designing for longevity rarely involves a single solution. At the University of Michigan’s school of architecture, Kaicheng tested the format with more than 30 students in two courses, which exposed the students to new ways of approaching design challenges and allowed the researchers to learn more about the toolkit’s function and usefulness.

Comprehensive improvements with broad benefits

They found that truly improving mobility for older adults typically requires holistic approaches rather than isolated interventions like sidewalk improvements. “One of our most surprising realizations was how much attention we give to aging populations without necessarily connecting that conversation to the physical environments in which people age,” Mona says. “Issues like senior housing, accessibility, transportation, and social services are often addressed separately, even though people’s experiences of a city depend on how all these systems work together.” They found that the benefits can be broader, too: Comprehensive improvements to these systems benefit not only seniors, but everyone who lives in or visits a city.