Age-Friendly Cities and Communities: A Global Agenda for Rethinking Urban Living

“Active Ageing” and the Rationale for Age-Friendly Cities – Part I

Jem Golden 

‘Active ageing’, promoted by the UN over the last 20 years, challenges the stereotyping of older people as frail, dependent and inevitably withdrawing from society. 

Instead it focuses on the rights of older people to experience mental, physical, and social well-being while remaining connected with their community. This in turn can promote longevity.

Building on this active ageing framework, the World Health Organization (WHO) developed the concept of the ‘age-friendly cities’ network from 2006. This is a bottom-up participatory approach based on elderly persons’ experiences and priorities.

The WHO age-friendly city concept is ambitious. It has eight inter-related age-friendly domains that apply to the built, social, and service environments. These domains are:

·     community support and health services

·     outdoor spaces and public buildings

·     transportation

·     housing

·     social participation

·     respect and social inclusion

·     civic participation and employment

·     communication and information

Within these eight domains, notions of respect and social inclusion carry as much weight and meaning as biomedicalised concepts of health. An age-friendly community is a place where older people are actively involved, valued, and supported with infrastructure and services that effectively accommodate their needs. 

A key finding from the literature on modification for making age-friendly environments shows that older persons benefit enormously by comparatively small design interventions. For example, underused spaces can be easily and permanently transformed by the addition of an age friendly seat.

The WHO age-friendly cities network currently has around 540 member cities and communities in 40 countries, covering over an estimated 180 million people. Cities joining the Network are required to commit to a five-year cycle of continually assessing and improving their age-friendliness.

While the WHO is neither the first nor the only organization involved in this area, its international high profile, credibility and forceful advocacy have become a particularly important resource for defining, describing and supporting implementation. WHO ‘toolkits’ include very detailed, comprehensive check lists for practical support in implementing age-friendliness in the eight domains.

For this series, I will analyse three domains: Outdoor space and buildings; Transportation; and Civic participation and employment using case studies from Amsterdam, Dublin and Oslo to Chiyai, Taiwan and Kashiwa, Japan among others.

Key questions to be explored include

·     How much is the elderly community consulted, to get crucial input and feedback?

·     Are there commonalities in best practice priorities in specific domains such as transportation? Why are these being applied now?

·     How do urban authorities set about evaluating the effectiveness of their age-friendly programmes?

·     How can we ‘measure’ the positive outcomes on older population’ quality of life?  

Despite many important initiatives to enhance the experiences of city living for the elderly worldwide, there remains a shortage of research exploring the results in elderly persons’ life satisfaction and well-being. These need to be addressed.