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 Communitie

s in International Comparison will be of par

ticular 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 Postdoctoral Researcher in Sociology at the National Fund for Scientific Research, Universite Catholique de Louvain, Belgium, and was Visiting Researcher at King’s College London, UK in 2010. His research interests centers on international discourses on active aging, public policy changes and their effects on the individual, and the meeting of Francophone and Anglophone theories on aging. In 2013, he will co-direct, with Jean-Philippe Viriot Durandal, an special issue on New perspectives on ageing through the ‘duty of ageing well’ for the international review Recherches sociologiques et anthropologiques. He is also part-time associate professor in social gerontology at the Universite Catholique de Louvain. Suzanne Garon, PhD is a professor at the School of Social Work of the University of Sherbrooke. Dr. Garon teaches both at the bachelor and master degree in social work, as well as in the doctoral in gerontology. Her teaching is mainly oriented towards the analysis of different societies as well as on qualitative and mixed-methods issues. She also trains practitioners in program evaluation in Quebec and in different countries (France, Mali).