The age-friendly community movement is a global phenomenon, currently growing with the support of the WHO and multiple international and national organizations in the field of aging. Drawing on an extensive collection of international case studies, this volume provides an introduction to the movement. The contributors – both researchers and practitioners – touch on a number of current tensions and issues in the movement and offer a wide-ranging set of recommendations for advancing age-friendly community development. The book concludes with a call for a radical transformation of a medical and lifestyle model of aging into a relational model of health and social/individual wellbeing.

This important book provides a comprehensive survey of 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 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.

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

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.

Taking a broad international perspective, this highly topical book casts light on patterns and processes that either place groups of older adults at risk of exclusion or are conducive to their inclusion.

What gives artefacts their power and beauty? This ethnographic study of the decorated long yams made by the Nyamikum Abelam in Papua New Guinea examines how these artefacts acquire their specific properties through processes that mobilise and recruit diverse entities, substances and domains. All come together to form the ‘finished product’ that is displayed, representing what could be an indigenous form of non-verbal ‘sociology’. Engaging with several contemporary anthropological topics (material culture, techniques, arts, aesthetics, rituals, botany, cosmology, Melanesian ethnography), the text also discusses in depth the complex position of the study of ‘technology’ within anthropology.