As part of new research with UniCredit, one of Europe’s leading banking and financial services organisations, NICA + Voice have been exploring a new way of thinking called Togetherhood, a longevity lens that reimagines how we build and sustain wellbeing: through the homes we live in, the communities we form, and the systems that finance and design them. By working together, UniCredit and NICA + Voice are bringing longevity thinking and innovation into real-world systems, showing how finance, when guided by human connection, has the power to change lives for millions. (You can read the full UniCredit Trend Report here.)
The City of Longevity framework brining in the city, neighbourhood and home as key elements for connection.
The Architecture of Belonging
Across cities and towns, signs of a new togetherness are taking shape. In Copenhagen, older and younger residents are sharing housing that combines private flats with communal kitchens and gardens, reducing isolation and care costs. In Milan, architects are redesigning apartment blocks to include shared studios and green terraces where neighbours meet daily. Across the UK, “chosen families,” friends and neighbours who share care, meals, and companionship, are proving that support networks can be built, not just born. These projects are small but powerful signals of a deeper shift: from independence as the goal, to interdependence as the foundation for a good life. Belonging, it turns out, is not a social extra. It’s a form of care.
When our environments are designed for proximity, reciprocity, and care, we all stand a better chance of ageing well, not in isolation, but in connection.
Home as a System for Wellbeing
In this new world of Togetherhood, the home is no longer a private retreat but a shared system for resilience. Developers are experimenting with adaptable homes that encourage connection, with co-operative ownership models that spread costs and caregiving responsibilities. These changes aren’t about nostalgia for community spirit, they’re about designing places that make belonging easy, natural, and sustainable.
Photography by George Kourounis
It’s a shift from “living alone together” to “living well together.” From homes as products, to homes as part of the health system. When our environments are designed for proximity, reciprocity, and care, we all stand a better chance of ageing well, not in isolation, but in connection.
Photography by Beth Macdonald
Finance with a Human Heart
It might sound unexpected, but finance could become one of the strongest enablers of connection. As people live longer and form more fluid households, banks and insurers are exploring how to support new models of living, from mortgages for friends who buy together to investment in shared and adaptable housing. When financial systems begin to value social health as part of economic value, they can help build the very foundations of belonging.
As one UniCredit trend insight puts it, Belonging is a health intervention. It’s a reminder that care doesn’t only happen in clinics or hospitals; it happens in the everyday exchanges that make life feel secure and shared.
The way we design and finance our homes could become one of the most powerful health interventions of the century.
Living Longer, Living Better — Together
At NICA + Voice, we’ve long believed that innovation begins with lived experience, the real stories, fears, and hopes of people navigating longer lives. Togetherhood takes that principle and turns it into infrastructure. It asks what would happen if our homes came with friendship built in. If our cities were designed not just to house us, but to hold us. If ageing became less about retreat, and more about reconnection.
Living longer changes everything. But it also gives us a rare opportunity to rebuild the foundations of life itself, starting with how we live together. Because when belonging becomes part of the blueprint, longevity stops being just about survival, it becomes about community.
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