This book examines trends in ageing societies and urban development before assessing the impact of ageing populations on urban areas and strategies for policy and governance. It includes 9 case studies.

The guide is aimed primarily at urban planners, but older citizens can use it to monitor progress towards more age-friendly cities. At its heart is a checklist of age-friendly features. For example, an age-friendly city has sufficient public benches that are well-situated, well-maintained and safe, as well as sufficient public toilets that are clean, secure, accessible by people with disabilities and well-indicated. Other key features of an age-friendly city include: well-maintained and well-lit sidewalks; public buildings that are fully accessible to people with disabilities; city bus drivers who wait until older people are seated before starting off and priority seating on buses; enough reserved parking spots for people with disabilities; housing integrated in the community that accommodates changing needs and abilities as people grow older; friendly, personalized service and information instead of automated answering services; easy-to-read written information in plain language; public and commercial services and stores in neighbourhoods close to where people live, rather than concentrated outside the city; and a civic culture that respects and includes older persons.

Ageing population and rapid urbanisation are the two major demographic shifts in today’s world. Architectural designs and urban policies have to deal with issues of an ever larger elderly population living in the cities, especially in old urban neighbourhoods, while also taking into consideration the evolving lifestyles and wellbeing of the diverse elderly demographic. Being able to continue living in these existing urban neighbourhoods would thus require necessary interventions, both to adapt the changing needs of the ageing population and to improve the deteriorating environment for better liveability. Creative Ageing Cities discusses the participation and contribution of the ageing population as a positive and creative force towards urban design and place-making, particularly in high-density urban contexts, as observed in a collection of empirical cases found in rapidly ageing Asian cities. This book is the first to bring together multidisciplinary scholastic research on ageing and urban issues from across top six ageing cities in Asia: Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Through these case studies, this book gives a good overview of diverse challenges and opportunities in the various Asian urban contexts and offers a new perspective of an ageing and urban design framework that emphasises multi-stakeholder collaboration, inter-generational relations and the collective wisdom of older people as a source of creativity.

As the drive towards creating age-friendly cities grows, this important book provides a comprehensive survey of theories and policies aimed at improving the quality of life of older people living in urban areas. In this book, part of the Ageing in a Global Context series, leading international researchers critically assess the problems and the potential of designing age-friendly environments. The book considers the different ways in which cities are responding to population ageing, the different strategies for developing age-friendly communities, and the extent to which older people themselves can be involved in the co-production of age-friendly policies and practices. The book includes a manifesto for the age-friendly movement, focused around tackling social inequality and promoting community empowerment.

The "Age-Friendly Cities & Communities: States of the Art and Future Perspectives" publication presents contemporary, innovative, and insightful narratives, debates, and frameworks based on an international collection of papers from scholars spanning the fields of gerontology, social sciences, architecture, computer science, and gerontechnology. This extensive collection of papers aims to move the narrative and debates forward in this interdisciplinary field of age-friendly cities and communities.

This publication is also available in: Español | Português Our physical and social environments are major influences on how we experience ageing and the opportunities it brings. Creating age-friendly environments enables all people to age well in a place that is right for them, continue to develop personally, be included, and contribute to their communities while enabling their independence and health. Developing age-friendly cities and communities (AFCC) is a proven way to create more age-friendly environments – for everyone. This guide provides direction to national authorities and stakeholders responsible for or involved in forming or sustaining national programmes for AFCC. The guide includes suggestions for meaningful engagement of older people in creating age-friendly environments, detailed examples of existing national AFCC programmes, and practical steps for creating or strengthening such a programme. The vision of this guide is for all countries to establish a national AFCC programme by the end of the UN Decade of Healthy Ageing (2021–2030) – neighbourhood by neighbourhood, city by city, and country by country.

A context of aging populations and urbanization has sparked a global movement to make urban spaces age-friendly. The Age-Friendly City program, developed by the World Health Organization, aims to improve local environments for all population groups, promote a positive aging identity, and empower local policy actors to support senior citizens. Despite growing enthusiasm and policy work by local governments worldwide, considerable gaps remain. These lacunae have led scholars and activists alike to align age-friendly city work with the concept of the right to the city. In The Right to an Age-Friendly City Meghan Joy zeroes in on the intricacies of developing an environment that promotes social and spatial justice for the elderly in Toronto. Weaving together the stories, struggles, and victories of local activists, government staff, and frontline service providers, Joy maps this complex policy area and examines the ways in which age-friendly work successfully enhances senior citizens' access to services and support in the local environment, recognizes the diverse needs of senior citizens in the city, and empowers policy actors from local government and the non-profit sector to support senior citizens. A detailed and timely examination, The Right to an Age-Friendly City offers both broad and tangible insights into the intermingled political, economic, cultural, and administrative changes needed to protect the rights of senior citizens to access urban space in Toronto and beyond.

This book concludes a trilogy that began with Intelligent Cities: Innovation, Knowledge Systems and digital spaces (Routledge 2002) and Intelligent Cities and Globalisation of Innovation Networks (Routledge 2008). Together these books examine intelligent cities as environments of innovation and collaborative problem-solving. In this final book, the focus is on planning, strategy and governance of intelligent cities. Divided into three parts, each section elaborates upon complementary aspects of intelligent city strategy and planning. Part I is about the drivers and architectures of the spatial intelligence of cities, while Part II turns to planning processes and discusses top-down and bottom-up planning for intelligent cities. Cities such as Amsterdam, Manchester, Stockholm and Helsinki are examples of cities that have used bottom-up planning through the gradual implementation of successive initiatives for regeneration. On the other hand, Living PlanIT, Neapolis in Cyprus, and Saudi Arabia intelligent cities have started with the top-down approach, setting up urban operating systems and common central platforms. Part III focuses on intelligent city strategies; how cities should manage the drivers of spatial intelligence, create smart environments, mobilise communities, and offer new solutions to address city problems. Main findings of the book are related to a series of models which capture fundamental aspects of intelligent cities making and operation. These models consider structure, function, planning, strategies toward intelligent environments and a model of governance based on mobilisation of communities, knowledge architectures, and innovation cycles.

This book brings together recent scholarly work concerned with efforts around the world to transform cities so that they are more age-friendly. Common to all of the initiatives is recognition of the importance of the community environment for the well-being of the rapidly growing numbers of older people. The collection includes chapters that examine the circumstances in which communities currently undertake significant age-friendly initiatives, public-private collaboration in age-friendly initiatives, collaboration across institutional sectors in age-friendly initiatives, policies that facilitate age-friendly developments, and the bases upon which age-friendly initiatives should be evaluated. It will be of interest to scholars in various fields including urban planning, gerontology, transportation planning, environmental design, and adult education.

One of the Financial Times' Best Economics Books of 2023 Visionary Oxford professor Ian Goldin and The Economist's Tom Lee-Devlin show why the city is where the battles of inequality, social division, pandemics and climate change must be faced. From centres of antiquity like Athens or Rome to modern metropolises like New York or Shanghai, cities throughout history have been the engines of human progress and the epicentres of our greatest achievements. Now, for the first time, more than half of humanity lives in cities, a share that continues to rise. In the developing world, cities are growing at a rate never seen before. In this book, Professor Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin show why making our societies fairer, more cohesive and sustainable must start with our cities. Globalization and technological change have concentrated wealth into a small number of booming metropolises, leaving many smaller cities and towns behind and feeding populist resentment. Yet even within seemingly thriving cities like London or San Francisco, the gap between the haves and have-nots continues to widen and our retreat into online worlds tears away at our social fabric. Meanwhile, pandemics and climate change pose existential threats to our increasingly urban world. Professor Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin combine the lessons of history with a deep understanding of the challenges confronting our world today to show why cities are at a crossroads – and hold our destinies in the balance.