Creating Aging-Friendly Communities examines the need to redesign America's communities to respond to our aging society. What differentiates it from other books is its breadth of focus, evidence-based consideration of key infrastructure characteristics, and examination of the strengths and limitations of promising approaches for fostering aging-friendly communities.

Creating Aging-Friendly Communities (CAFC) examines the need to redesign America's communities to respond to the realities of our rapidly aging society. The text focuses on the interface between individuals and their environments, and the ways in which communities can enhance individual and community well-being. What differentiates CAFC from other books is its breadth of focus, its comprehensive and evidence-based consideration of key concepts, its inclusion of social as well as physical infrastructure characteristics, and its intensive examination of models of community change for fostering aging-friendliness. It presents a conceptually and empirically-based model of aging-friendliness, identifies environmental modifications that could enhance individual and community well-being, outlines a typology of community change approaches, and considers the potential efficacy of those approaches. This book identifies practical implications for policies, programs, and knowledge development designed to help communities become more aging-friendly.

This handbook presents an overview of studies on the relationship of active ageing and quality of life. It addresses the new challenges of ageing from the paradigm of positive ageing (active, healthy and successful) for a better quality of life. It provides theoretical perspectives and empirical studies, including scientific knowledge as well as practical experiences about the good ageing and the quality of later life around the world, in order to respond to the challenges of an aged population. The handbook is structured in 4 sections covering theoretical and conceptual perspectives, social policy issues and research agenda, methods, measurement instrument-scales and evaluations, and lastly application studies including domains and geographical contexts. Chapter 5 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com./div

Community music as a field of practice, pedagogy, and research has come of age. The past decade has witnessed an exponential growth in practices, courses, programs, and research in communities and classrooms, and within the organizations dedicated to the subject. The Oxford Handbook of Community Music gives an authoritative and comprehensive review of what has been achieved in the field to date and what might be expected in the future. This Handbook addresses community music through five focused lenses: contexts, transformations, politics, intersections, and education. It not only captures the vibrant, dynamic, and divergent approaches that now characterize the field, but also charts the new and emerging contexts, practices, pedagogies, and research approaches that will define it in the coming decades. The contributors to this Handbook outline community music's common values that center on social justice, human rights, cultural democracy, participation, and hospitality from a range of different cultural contexts and perspectives. As such, The Oxford Handbook of Community Music provides a snapshot of what has become a truly global phenomenon.

In recent decades, the North American public has pursued an inspirational vision of successful aging—striving through medical technique and individual effort to eradicate the declines, vulnerabilities, and dependencies previously commonly associated with old age. On the face of it, this bold new vision of successful, healthy, and active aging is highly appealing. But it also rests on a deep cultural discomfort with aging and being old. The contributors to Successful Aging as a Contemporary Obsession explore how the successful aging movement is playing out across five continents. Their chapters investigate a variety of people, including Catholic nuns in the United States; Hindu ashram dwellers; older American women seeking plastic surgery; aging African-American lesbians and gay men in the District of Columbia; Chicago home health care workers and their aging clients; Mexican men foregoing Viagra; dementia and Alzheimer sufferers in the United States and Brazil; and aging policies in Denmark, Poland, India, China, Japan, and Uganda. This book offers a fresh look at a major cultural and public health movement of our time, questioning what has become for many a taken-for-granted goal—aging in a way that almost denies aging itself.

Arts in Healthy Aging examines public policies and professional practices that effectively use the arts to support health and well-being outcomes in older adults. It offers a comprehensive study of why and how purposefully-designed programs that engage the visual, performing, and literary arts can support the health and well-being of older adults. The authors argue that it is the right time for the American arts and aging movement to restructure itself as a national network and advocacy coalition across four domains: the arts, health, aging, and lifelong learning. Building on decades of published research, government documents, and program models, this scholarly volume provides historical perspectives, new theoretical approaches, analytical models, resources for researchers and practitioners, and pathways forward for advancing the interdisciplinary arts in healthy aging field of scholarship and practice. Although focused on the United States, the discussion of policies and practices is relevant and applicable to other countries as appropriate to their specific contexts.