Amicable Urbanism - Age-friendly Cities: Elderly-Centred Urban Planning

Innovation Showcase
Yolanda María De La Fuente Robles,  Cristina Diaz Roman,  Virginia Fuentes  

The ageing of the world's population and its urban planning leads to initiatives which make elderly protagonist. Within these traditional city designs, it is possible to find some hostile elements that cause insecurity in their population, affecting more radically the group of ageing people; all this together with the fact that the place where people live is directly related to healthy ageing, through barriers or incentives that affect opportunities, decisions and behaviour, as well as the experience of old age. Therefore, it is important to understand the consequences of limiting, disabling and isolating environments, with an analysis of their effects and the new models of soft cities and proposals for cities designed with people at the centre and away from the economistic model, highlighting the advance from the Smart City model to the Smart Human City. Focusing on "Age-friendly cities" and the Vancouver model of participation proposed by the WHO. In this new way of doing things, where urban planning and environment design come together, the role of the administrations must be key to provide inclusive responses to these needs that will be reinforced with the ageing of the population; this is why now is the time to mobilise the bases of intervention and recover empathy, active listening and everything focused through the use of participatory design thinking. To demonstrate a result of this new way of doing things, we present the success story of the city of Jaén, through the "I Municipal Plan Jaén Ciudad Amigable con los Mayores".