A Manifesto for All-Age Friendly Cities: Working paper 2 of the Bristol All-Age Friendly City group

The Bristol All-Age Friendly City project began in Spring-Summer 2014. The initial programme of work was designed to bring people in the city together, including artists, local policy makers, computer scientists, community organisations and practitioners working with children and older people, to imagine the future city from the perspective of children and older adults - groups who are often overlooked in the design and planning of cities today. 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 wand development.

In this 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. In this paper we elaborate our shared vision of what might constitute an ‘All-Age friendly’ city and discuss possible next steps for this group and others emerging across the UK and internationally. We are grateful to the TSB/Future Cities Catapult for funding the workshops and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for enabling Keri’s involvement as part of her Connected Communities Leadership Fellowship. We are also grateful to the contributors to the workshops who gave their ideas and experience so generously. We want to continue these conversations and look forward to hearing from others who are interested in sharing these ideas nationally and globally.