All Age Friendly City
Years active: 2014-2015
Funded by Future Cities Catapult
The All-Age-Friendly City project, carried out in Spring-Summer 2014, emerged from a desire to imagine the future city from the perspective of those people – children and older adults – who are too often overlooked in the design and planning of cities today.
The project aimed to begin to address this issue, through bringing together researchers working in childhood and aging, members of local government, artists, community groups, computer scientists, developers and practitioners working with children and older adults, to develop ideas about how cities might better meet the needs and interests of our oldest and youngest generations.
This project began with desk research and several workshops with around 50 people conducted by us in collaboration with the Future Cities Catapult. Working paper 1 was published after this phase. In it, we outlined why designing the All Age Friendly city is an urgent contemporary concern, the resources available to achieve this goal and four key areas for future work and development. In a second working paper we return to some of these issues. In Spring-Summer 2015 we conducted an analysis of the ‘Child Friendly City’ and ‘Age Friendly City’ metrics in order to identify shared ideas and map missing issues in both.
A subsequent event brought together those in the city who were already actively seeking to develop a ’child’ and ‘age’ friendly city – but who were currently working largely in silos. The research aims to suggest why designing the All-Age-Friendly city is an urgent contemporary concern, the resources that are available to us to do this, and identifies four key areas for future development: building intergenerational trust, encouraging encounters across generations, re-imagining housing, and creating all-age friendly transport systems.
Principal investigators
- Helen Manchester
- Keri Facer
Co-researchers
- Lindsey Horner