Age-Friendly Cities and Communities in International Comparison: Political Lessons, Scientific Avenues, and Democratic Issues

The supportive role of urban spaces in active aging is explored on a world scale in this unique resource, using the WHO’s Age-Friendly Cities and Community model. Case studies from the U.S., Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, and elsewhere demonstrate how the model translates to fit diverse social, political, and economic realities across cultures and continents, ways age-friendly programs promote senior empowerment, and how their value can be effectively assessed. Age-friendly criteria for communities are defined and critiqued while extensive empirical data describe challenges as they affect elders globally and how environmental support can help meet them. These chapters offer age-friendly cities as a corrective to the overemphasis on the medical aspects of elders’ lives, and should inspire new research, practice, and public policy.

Included in the coverage:

• A critical review of the WHO Age-Friendly Cities Methodology and its implementation.
• Seniors’ perspectives on age-friendly communities.
• The implementation of age-friendly cities in three districts of Argentina.
• Age-friendly New York City: a case study.
• Toward an age-friendly European Union.
• Age-friendliness, childhood, and dementia: toward generationally intelligent environments.

With its balance of attention to universal and culture-specific concerns, Age-Friendly Cities and Communities in International Comparison will be of particular interest to sociologists, gerontologists, and policymakers.

＂Given the rapid adoption of the age-friendly perspective, following its development by the World Health Organization, the critical assessment offered in this volume is especially welcome＂.

Professor Chris Phillipson, University of Manchester

Thibauld Moulaert, PhD is Associated professor at the Department of Social Work, University of Sherbrooke, Canada and part-time Invited Professor at the Haute École de la Province de Namur (HEPN), Belgium. After a postdoctoral Fellowship in sociology at the National Fund for Scientific Research, Université Catholique de Louvain, including a Visiting Research at King’s College London, UK in 2010, he works as a scientific coordinator of a 3 years international project for REAICTIS (Réseau d’Étude International sur l’Âge, la Citoyenneté et l’Intégration Socio-économique) on older people volunteering and on older people citizenship and environments. His first book Governing the End of the Career at a Distance. Outplacement and Active Ageing in Employment (Peter Lang, 2012) received a prize for publication from the Fondation Universitaire; in 2013, he co-edited, with Jean-Philippe Viriot Durandal, a special issue on New perspectives on ageing through the ’duty of ageing well’ for the international review Recherches sociologiques et anthropologiques.