How Can the Lived Environment Support Healthy Ageing? A Spatial Indicators Framework for the Assessment of Age-Friendly Communities.

Geoff Woolcock,Melanie Davern,Kathleen Brasher,Rachel Winterton

doi:10.3390/ijerph17207685

Abstract

The Age-Friendly Cities and Communities Guide was released by the World Health Organization over a decade ago with the aim of creating environments that support healthy ageing. The comprehensive framework includes the domains of outdoor spaces and buildings, transportation, housing, social participation, respect and inclusion, civic participation and employment, communication and information, and community and health services. A major critique of the age-friendly community movement has argued for a more clearly defined scope of actions, the need to measure or quantify results and increase the connections to policy and funding levers. This paper provides a quantifiable spatial indicators framework to assess local lived environments according to each Age-Friendly Cities and Communities (AFC) domain. The selection of these AFC spatial indicators can be applied within local neighbourhoods, census tracts, suburbs, municipalities, or cities with minimal resource requirements other than applied spatial analysis, which addresses past critiques of the Age-Friendly Community movement. The framework has great potential for applications within local, national, and international policy and planning contexts in the future.

Highlights

Research has long recognized that environmental factors play a significant role in determining health and wellbeing in older age [1], and there are rising proportions of older people in the populations across the world
This paper proposes spatial indicator tools that can be applied for the assessment of AFC in local lived environments using a
The following section describes each of the selected AFC spatial indicators with research

Summary

Introduction

Research has long recognized that environmental factors play a significant role in determining health and wellbeing in older age [1], and there are rising proportions of older people in the populations across the world. 2020–2030 calls for sustained global action to generate transformative change in four priority areas: addressing ageism; creating age-friendly communities; delivering integrated and person centered care; and providing long-term care [2,3]. Increased urbanization and policy discourses supporting ageing in place add to the urgency to create and plan for age-friendly environments. The World Health Organization (WHO) World Report on Ageing and Health [6] documented how age-friendly environments play a. Public Health 2020, 17, 7685; doi:10.3390/ijerph17207685 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph

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