Age Friendly rights to the city

Presenter: Professor Judith Sixsmith

Judith Sixsmith is Professor of Health Research and Director of TCELT at the University of Dundee, UK. Her research interests lie in the areas of health and wellbeing where she explores the ways in which people, particularly older people and those living in disadvantaged communities, experience processes of marginalisation within existing health, social and cultural systems. Her current research includes projects on placemaking with older people, including issues of age friendly cities and communities, ageing and technology, intergenerational design, housing for cultural and religious minorities and ageing-well-in-the-right-place. An expert in qualitative methodologies, Judith prioritises the involvement of participants in the design, implementation, interpretation and dissemination phases of her research, including co-researchers from highly marginalised groups such as asylum seekers, refugees and older frail people within qualitative frameworks.

An increasingly ageing population presents new challenges to designing urban environments that support and promote everyday engagement, health and wellbeing for older adults. The World Health Organisation’s Global Age-Friendly Cities movement and associated guidelines have identified the need to develop cities and communities that optimise opportunities for health, participation and security in order to enhance quality of life as people age. Ensuring that age-friendly urban environments create opportunities for healthy ageing require cities and communities that embed citizen rights to access and move around the city and be actively involved in the making and re-making of the city. These initiatives raise important questions – what are older adults’ everyday experiences and reflections on exercising their rights to the city they live in? What are the challenges and opportunities in supporting older adults’ rights to the city as they transition through they become older? What more can be done to support healthy, active ageing through different life transitions? Two international ESRC funded PLACEAGE projects conducted from 2016-21 (www.placeage.org) address these questions by exploring the lived experiences of older adults as they negotiate their local communities and cities. Using the UK data and drawing on qualitative data (90 semi-structured interviews, 60 walking interviews, 30 photo diaries, 9 knowledge cafés and 9 community mapping workshops) collected in three cities (Glasgow, Edinburgh and Manchester) across nine neighbourhoods in the UK, several key themes were generated. The themes unpack a rights-based approach to age-friendly communities and cities which centre on mobility and access, respect, (in)visibility and involvement in decision-making. The findings offer pathways towards supportive age-friendly design, policy and practice which recognise that cities constitute complex historical, psycho-social and cultural webs of interconnectedness across people, organisations and places where choices made and actions performed have wide repercussions on older adults everyday lives, their relationships, transitions through the life course and on societal values that position individual older people and older people in general as ‘the invisible’ on our streets and communities.