The Aging City | Nov 8th at 11:04am
During the talk titled An Agenda for Urban Design Education, I was pleasantly surprised when Taner Oc of the University of Nottingham brought up the needs of aging citizens in cities. In Nottingham, they now have more residents over the age of 65 than under the age of 16—a trend, he says, that is prevalent in many European cities. In the U.S., there are 76 million baby boomers and one of them turns 50 every seven seconds. By 2026, the population of Americans over 65 will have doubled to 71.5 million.
Some people live in cities by choice, Oc says, but “quite a few of them are there because they are trapped there.” Seniors are increasingly among that latter category. Many would love to age in place gracefully, but they cannot successfully access the city or even their own homes, in many cases, due to poor design consideration. In the U.S., our design answer for the aging is frequently the exurban Continued Care Retirement Community. The building type is fueled, literally, by a car-culture carrying its elders out to pasture. Oc put forth the idea of “greening the gray city” and reminded us to remember the needs of all when crafting a vision for the future city.
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture and design for publications like The New York Times Magazine, Architect, and Metropolis. In addition to her own blog, Urban Palimpsest, Dickinson is a regular contributor to the Metropolis blog, P/O/V.
Carole on Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 2:46pm
This is a valuable and important insight.
We can hope, too, that the aging of us all will be a spur to “universal design,” the approach that seeks to create spaces and objects accessible for everyone. Beyond those slowed by the wear and tear of long years we have millions coping with other limitations, great and small. We also have an obligation to remember the tragically large number of war veterans; their lives have been saved by modern battlefield medicine but at the cost of injuries that will affect every action, every day, for the rest of their lives.