The World Health Organization emphasizes the importance of providing elderly-friendly physical environments and services in order to realize healthy aging, while urging to prepare countermeasures at the community level. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic in December 2019, a consensus is being formed among the public that the elderly should be able to receive the care services that they need in residential spaces. In response to these social changes, the Government of South Korea (hereafter, Korea) announced that it would discover and expand a ‘community care housing (care service + housing)’ model that connects various care services (nursing care, medical care, and independent living support) and residential environment (2018), and plans to build a customized residence in consideration of the physical and cognitive characteristics of the elderly.

In order to plan for customized community care housing, a channel is required to reflect the opinions of the elderly as users as early as pogsible at the design stage, and to experiment and supplement ideas by directly experiencing and evaluating services and physical environments in actual daily life. However, community care housing in Korea, that is, the current procedure of the projects for public rental housing for the elderly, lacks the steps to reflect the various needs of users. For most of the projects, suppliers plan and design the housing for the elderly and supply them to consumers. In this respect, the living lab, which has been recently used as a methodology for customized architecture and urban design, can be used as an effective tool for planning customized community care housing.

Therefore, the applicability of the living lab was investigated as a tool to support the community care housing plan for the elderly. An operational plan of the living lab was also proposed that is applicable for the community care housing plan for the elderly. Considering the characteristics of the elderly community care housing and the purpose of its construction, the main care targets were determined as people aged 65 or older with mild symptoms of an insufficient physical and cognitive level. The spatial scope was limited to public rental housing.