CAN GLOBAL CITIES BE AGE-FRIENDLY CITIES? URBAN DEVELOPMENT AND

AGEING POPULATIONS

Chris Phillipson and Tine Buffel School of Social Science/MICRA

The University of Manchester, UK Paper to 13th Annual Conference, IFA, Brisbane

AREAS FOR DISCUSSION

• Demographic change and global cities

• Development of the ‘age-friendly’ approach

• Pressures affecting implementation of ‘age-friendly’ model

• Developing a new agenda for ‘age-friendly’ cities and communities

Sources: Institut de la du Quebec (2014); Insee, modele OMPHALE; Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung und Umwelt Berlin (2016); ONS (2016).

*Berlin 2014-2030, ** Montreal 2011-2031.

17.6

11.3

13.1

20.1

22.0

14.4

14.3

9.5

15.1

15.3

19.0

11.5

Newcastle

Manchester

Birmingham

Montreal**

Berlin*

London

Table 1. Proportion of people aged 65 and over in capital cities, 2014-2031 (Projected)

2014 2031

Source: ABS 2013b.

22.9

15.4

21.3

16

15.1

16.5

16.7

15.7

11

15.7

11.9

12.5

13.2

13

Hobart

Canberra

Adelaide

Brisbane

Perth

Melbourne

Sydney

Table 2. Proportion of people aged 65 and over in Australian capital cities, 2012 and 2031 (Projected)

2012 2031

THE AFC MODEL AND POLITICAL ECONOMY OF URBAN CHANGE

• Rapid expansion of Global Network of AFCs – 286 cities & communities (and rising) but in context of:

Economic recession

Contraction of welfare state

Austerity policies

Intensification of global competition (Walsh et al., 2015; Sassen, 2014; Gamble, 2016)

CASE STUDIES

• New York • Manchester • London • Age-Friendly Ireland • Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney • Barcelona • Madrid • San Francisco Buffel, T. & Phillipson, C. (2016) Cities (Vol 55: 94-100)

Problems facing aspiring AFCs

• The austerity problem

• The gentrification problem

• The ownership problem

The Austerity Problem

• Walsh and Harvey’s (2012) review of Ireland’s Age-Friendly Cities and Counties programme identified a challenges arising from austerity policies:

‘Challenge of implementing [AFC] on a cost-neutral basis in difficult economic conditions. This raises important concerns about the effectiveness and sustainability of Ireland’s age-friendly programme. It …raises concerns about how the age-friendly programme, through a combination of its cost-neutral approach and its active ageing focus, may end up unintentionally supporting policies that effectively reduce state involvement in ageing communities’.

San Francisco [‘Committed to becoming more age-friendly’] illustrates pressures of urban gentrification. The presence of affluent residents, primarily employees from high-tech companies based in Silicon Valley, leading to the gentrification of low-income neighbourhoods (Erwert, 2014).

Despite a policy of rent control and strict rules on eviction, numerous cases of landlords evicting older tenants who have occupied the same apartment for decades, replacing them with executives in the remunerative high-tech sector (Portacolone & Halpern, 2014).

The gentrification problem

The ownership problem

Attempts to create AFCs have to work within the context of private/corporately-owned rather than public-owned spaces:

‘As the twenty-first century corporations [ and global economic elites] take over large parts of the city, the last decade has seen a huge shift in landownership, away from streets, public spaces and buildings in public ownership and towards the creation of new private estates…’. (Minton, Ground Control, 2009: 20).

Towards a new AFC agenda for global cities

- Focus on housing as the pivot for AFCs

- Focus on urban management

- Focus on embedding AFC work in a radical public policy agenda

HOUSING

Transportation

Social Participation

Respect and social

inclusion

Civic participation and employment

Communication and information

Community support and

health services

Outdoor spaces and

buildings

Housing crisis in global cities

• Decline of affordable housing (Navarro & Lee, 2014; Dorling, 2015)

• Increase and ‘greying’ of homeless population (Desmond, 2016; NYT, 2016)

• Lifetime renting for those on low and middle incomes staying in cities (Projections: 60% 20-39 renting; 21% 45-54 in UK by 2025, PwC, 2016)

• Role of international developers and ‘global economic elites’ distorting housing markets: ‘ghost streets’; 10% of central London properties registered to offshore tax havens (Booth et al., 2016).

• Building of apartments rather than ‘family-friendly’

housing (e.g. Sydney & Melbourne) (Birrell & McCloskey, 2016)

• Increase in slum properties/use of garages/sheds as accommodation for migrant groups (Migrants Rights Network, 2013)

Housing security and the development of age-friendly cities

• Transport: Ensuring choice and access to good quality housing in cities prevents urban sprawl and long-distance commuting.

• Outdoor spaces and buildings: securing good quality housing should also be part of equalising access to good quality public space and buildings.

• Respect and social inclusion: housing security promotes community cohesion by reducing population churn.

• Social /Civic participation: increases through policies which reduce social segregation through unequal housing opportunities; reducing gap between ‘property rich’ and ‘property poor’.

• Community support and health services: good housing strengthens public health for all age groups.

MANAGING URBAN DEVELOPMENT

• Embed AFC agenda with urban planning agenda (e.g. Age-Friendly Philadelphia) (Glicksman & Ring, 2016)

• Influence organisations outside traditional ageing network but need to have much wider constituency (environmental groups, developers)

• AFC model needs to recognise importance of building coalitions with urban interest groups. Weakness of model is that it operates outside the political & economic interests which shape urban environments (Buffel & Phillipson, 2016).

• AFC must be embedded in networks of power which control urban life (e.g. Caro, 2015)

DEVELOPING A RADICAL PUBLIC POLICY AGENDA

• Embedding age-friendly policies in urban economic development as well as public health

• Developing new sources of finance to develop age-friendly cities:

Creation of an ‘inclusive city fund’: levy on property sales on homes above a certain value: fund to be used to develop social/affordable housing (Atkinson et al., 2016).

Land value tax on undeveloped developable land worth above a certain value: as an encouragement for new building and housing investment (Dorling, 2015).

CONCLUSION: CONDITIONS FOR DEVELOPING GLOBAL AFCs

• Collaborative urbanism – working with multiple stakeholders

• Re-distributive urbanism – working to reduce inequalities and influence of global economic elites

• Inter-generational urbanism – working to create connections across and within generations

Age-friendly movement needs to tackle the ‘big’ issues

‘Instead of or perhaps in addition to the multidimensional frameworks that currently organize age-friendly work, it is time to narrow the focus of the work and concentrate not on all things needed to become age-friendly but the strategic opportunities currently available.

It is time to pull “big levers” (e.g. in housing, finance, transportation, economic development) that if successful could greatly facilitate age-friendly work’.

Lawler, K (2015) Age-friendly communities: go big or go home. Public Policy & Aging Report.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors are grateful to Paul McGarry, Strategic Lead, Greater Manchester Ageing Hub, for this support in developing some of the ideas in this paper. The authors have also benefited from work with members of the Manchester Urban Ageing Research Group and the International Population and Urbanisation Research Group.

SELECTED REFERENCES

Birrell, B. & McClosky, D. (2016) Sydney and Melbourne’s Housing Affordability Crisis Report Two: No End in Sight. The Australian Population Research Institute

Buffel, T. & Phillipson, C. ‘Can global cities be age-friendly cities: Urban development and ageing populations’. Cities, 55:94-100

Dorling, D. (2015) All that is Solid: how the great housing disaster defines our times and what we can do about it. Penguin Books

Minton, A. (2009) Ground Control. Penguin Books

New York: Office of the Comptroller (2014) The Growing Gap: New York City’s Housing Affordability Challenge.

Portacolone, E. & Halpern, J. (2014) ‘ “Move or Suffer”: is age segregation the new norm for older Americans living alone’. Journal of Applied Gerontology.

REFERENCES

Macgourney, A. (2016) ‘Old and on the streets’. New York Times, May 31st. Phillipson, C (2011) Developing age-friendly communities: New approaches to growing old in urban communities. In Settersten, R and Angel, J (eds) Handbook of Sociology of Aging. New York: Springer Walsh, K. (2015) ‘Interrogating the “age-friendly” community in austerity: myths, realities and the influence of place context’. In Walsh, K., Carney, G. and Lèime, Á (eds) Ageing Through Austerity. Bristol: Policy Press. Zukin, S. 2010. The Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. New York: Oxford University Press