Urban Design to accelerate achieving an Age-Friendly and an Accessible Ontario by 2025
Yvonne Yeung MBA PMP MCIP RPP LEED AP
Vice President of Development, Transit Oriented Communities | Infrastructure Ontario
Yvonne Yeung, Manager of Urban Design, City of Brampton
The experience of pandemic and social distancing open an opportunity to rethink the design of our physical environment and our "common ground", both indoor and outdoor.
Such rethinking can be leveraged to accelerate the shaping of our cities to be age-friendly and accessible at a provincial and global scale by 2025, which aligns with
- The Province of Ontario Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act?2005 (AODA)'s goal of an Accessible Ontario by 2025
- The World Health Organization (WHO) Global Age-Friendly Cities Project's goal of achieving Age-friendly Globally by 2025. A movement that drives over 1000 cities in 41 countries to establish both Age-friendly policies and programs to shape the lives of over 240 million people worldwide.
- According to United Nations estimates, the number of older persons (60+) will double from 2010's 600 million to 1.2 billion by 2025, and again, to 2 billion by 2050.
The implementation of this rethinking requires a cross-jurisdiction approach to ensure citizen's experience of this improved environment is seamless and barrier-free.
Cities, globally, have the opportunity to act proactively now to implement this thinking through
- updating design criteria in their building codes and accessibility codes;
- further the design thinking from site-scale to neighbourhood and city-scale, designing 20min age-friendly neighbourhood as a scalable model;
- tasking urban designers to take this integral role to problem solve and create pilots to reshape the decision-making chain towards evidence-based and performance-based.
https://www.ontario.ca/document/finding-right-fit-age-friendly-community-planning
https://extranet.who.int/agefriendlyworld/