Towards All Age Friendly Cities. Working paper 1 of the Bristol All-Age Friendly City group

The All-Age-Friendly City project, carried out in Spring-Summer 2014,
emerged from a desire to imagine the future city from the perspectives of
those people – children and older adults – who are too often overlooked in the
design and planning of cities today.
Today, reports on ‘the Smart City’ tend to make little or no mention of the
wide variety of different age groups living in cities, or of the different and
sometimes shared needs of a multi-generational city. This is not just an
inevitable oversight that arises when working age adults design
infrastructure. It is also a serious flaw in the design imagination shaping the
future city: significant amounts of public expenditure go precisely to these age
groups and to those institutions and services responsible for addressing the
interests of children and older adults. If we want a future city that is adequate
to the people living in it, therefore, designers, policy makers, developers and
planners need to think carefully about all ages and stages of life.
To begin to address this issue, the All-Age-Friendly City project brought
together researchers working in childhood and aging, members of local
government, artists, community groups, computer scientists, developers,
planners 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 first working paper builds on desk research and workshops conducted by
the Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, in collaboration with
the Future Cities Catapult in Spring/Summer 2014. It outlines 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: