Local Practice Exploration on "Youth-Elderly Symbiosis" Community Interior Design in the Context of Population Aging

Abstract

Against the backdrop of China’s profound demographic shift toward deep aging, the long-standing age-segregated planning logic for traditional community spaces has encountered systematic challenges. The conventional planning paradigm that implicitly divides community functions strictly by age groups has increasingly failed to align with the authentic daily living demands of contemporary residents. This study breaks away from the inertial design convention of enclosing a dedicated, isolated senior care zone exclusively for the elderly population, and instead explores a more relaxed, daily-life-embedded intergenerational coexistence pattern. Under this framework, young tenants and nearby working young adults reside in the same community as native elderly residents, with independent, undisturbed private living zones for each group. Natural casual encounters can occur spontaneously during fragmented daily routines such as grabbing breakfast, picking up parcels, or taking downstairs walks, allowing intergenerational familiarity to develop gradually without the need for deliberately organized activities by community staff. This research transforms the one-way output mode of spatial design into a "user co-creation" paradigm, positioning the elderly as core spatial co-creation subjects with rich long-term living experience, rather than being merely defined as passive service recipients. By integrating advanced practical cases of all-age communities at home and abroad, this paper constructs an implementation framework for youth-elderly integrated interior design that fits the urban community development context in China, systematically sorted out from three dimensions: intergenerational demand matching, spatial scenario stratification, and participation mechanism construction. It provides interdisciplinary design theoretical support and actionable practical solutions for improving the home-based community elderly care service supply system and building an age-friendly society.