DOI: 10.3390/buildings16193886 ISSN: 2075-5309

Age-Friendly Renewal of Indoor Community Public Spaces to Enhance Older Adults’ Well-Being: A Case Study of Pubei Community, Changzhou

Chao Xu, Pingping Xu, Zhihuan Zhang, Wenting Yang, Yongfa Wu

As populations age, indoor community public spaces play an increasingly important role in supporting older adults’ daily activities, social interaction, and well-being. This study uses Pubei Community in Changzhou as a case study and develops age-friendly renewal strategies tailored to the community context. Through interviews and questionnaire surveys, the study systematically identifies older residents’ needs regarding the use of community public spaces. The Affinity Diagramming (AD) method is first employed to categorize and organize the information collected from the field investigation, followed by the application of the Fuzzy Kano (FKANO) model to screen and identify core user needs. The Precedence Chart (PC) method and CRITIC weighting method are then integrated to calculate combined weights for the evaluation indicators and rank them, thereby establishing the priority of user needs. Subsequently, user needs and design requirements are incorporated into Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to construct a House of Quality (HOQ), which informs age-friendly renewal strategies and design solutions for Pubei Community’s public spaces. The results indicate that, after four need indicators were excluded, safety needs (0.099), health and emergency needs (0.091), and spatial convenience needs (0.084) ranked among the highest in terms of combined weight. Based on these user needs, 15 design requirements were identified, among which barrier-free access (0.096), health and emergency facilities (0.091), and handrail facilities (0.088) had high relative weights, indicating that these elements should be prioritized in the age-friendly renewal of community public spaces.