A prerequisite for the development of architecture’s potential to support a safe and independent living of all people is the planning of demographically sustainable buildings. This includes age-appropriate, mainly barrier-free architecture, and the use of ambient assisted living systems. In practice, however, there are currently great obstacles realising buildings for the older generation. Essential starting points for overcoming these difficulties are the improvement of the education and further training of architects, as well as the hitherto often insufficient interdisciplinary exchange in the planning process between architects, technical planners and the housing industry. As a first step the education, further training and existing knowledge of architects were analysed. This included a research of the education content of architecture students at the nine leading Institutes of Technology in Germany (TU9), an online survey for architects to assess their knowledge of building for older adults and disabled people, as well as an analysis of further training courses for barrier-free planning offered by the Architectural Associations of the federal states in Germany in the past three years. As a second step the cooperation between architects and technical planners was investigated. In addition, their interaction has been studied in four best practice examples. The design of barrier-free architecture is often underrepresented in the education at the TU9 and accessibility seems to be an unattractive topic there. In summary, it can be stated that accessibility and design of demographically sustainable buildings should be an obvious part of architectural education. In addition, it is useful to offer additional training courses for architects that fill in the gaps in their education, improve their knowledge, discuss the accessibility of buildings and ambient assisted living systems and also deal with current, aesthetic and practical design solutions. The interviews, which were part of the second step of the research, form the basis of an in-depth and comparative analysis to cooperation and existing challenges in the planning process. The analysis showed differences in type of client, project organisation, user requirements and applied ambient assisted living systems, while the projects had parallels in the cooperation of the planning partners. Finally, success factors were identified for cooperation and planning in future demographic sustainable projects. Keywords – ambient assisted living, accessibility, education, process management, planning