Ageing and the City: Recent Episodes
Cambridge University
Ageing and the City: Everyday Experiences of Older People in Urban Environments
What it means to grow older in cities is a question of increasing importance as world population ageing and urbanisation continue to accelerate. Older people and the cities within which they live, face numerous challenges across areas of health and social care, housing, transport, infrastructure, and the built environment. Cross-disciplinary and multi-levelled approaches are essential for understanding the current condition and development of cities and whether or not they are 'age friendly'. Recognising this need, this seminar series will bring together researchers, policy makers and practitioners from social and science fields – including architecture, public health, epidemiology, planning, local government and sociology – who influence the production of cities but who too rarely interact. Focused around notions of 'the everyday', speakers will reflect on how their work, experiences or research specifically engage with everyday urban environments, the age friendliness of these environments, and why, politically, socially and spatially, they think this is so.
Administrative assistance: gradfac@crassh.cam.ac.uk
Catharine Ward Thompson (Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Edinburgh)
Respondent: Sebastian Macmillan (Director, Interdisciplinary Design for the Built Environment, Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge) Ben Spencer (Research Fellow, School of the Built Environment, Oxford Brookes University)
Abstract
The presentation draws on a number of projects with older people to understand what inspires and enables access to outdoor environments as we age. Sustainable urban development requires us to ensure our cities are age-friendly, as the World Health Organisation has underlined in considering links between health, quality of life and sustainability. We have good evidence on the qualities of the outdoor environment that either support or frustrate access in older age, and the presentation will briefly summarise these, with a particular focus on green and open space. But we also have evidence that early life experience can make a difference to how the environment is perceived and experienced in later life, and (in particular) the health and wellbeing implications of these experiences across the lifecourse. There are also potential conflicts between user demands and needs at different life stages, which challenge urban and landscape designers’ ability to deliver inclusive design.
Aspirations of Active Ageing: How People's Biographies and Places' Histories Shape Active Living
Cornelia Guell (Lecturer, Medical School, University of Exeter)
Malcolm Tait (Professor of Planning, University of Sheffield)
Respondents: Sarah Harper (Professor of Gerontology, Oxford Institute of Ageing, University of Oxford) Gemma Burgess (Senior Research Associate, Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research, Land Economy)
Developing an Older People's Housing Strategy in Cambridgeshire: The Challenges of Interdisciplinary Working
Stephen Hills (Director of Housing, South Cambridgeshire District Council)
Respondents: Stephen Green (Research Fellow, Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research, Sheffield Hallam University) Julie Baird (Assistant Director for Growth, West Suffolk Councils)
Chris Phillipson (Professor of Sociology and Social Gerontology, University of Manchester)