CIP Niagara Conference – Old Age Ain’t for Sissies
Tags: aging, CIP, communication, Demographics, racism, Saanich, seniors, transit, youth
This afternoon’s session, entitled “Old Age Ain’t for Sissies and What that Means for Planners” was a full house. The enthusiasm shown for this topic indicates that planners are very aware of impending demographic changes that will require accommodating aging communities to become a planning priority. The moderator, Don May, opened the presentation with a mind-boggling time-lapse series of Canadian population pyramids from the late 19th century. (You can see a similar series of pyramids online here.) Canada expects an 86% increase in its senior population over the next 20 years; by 2041, one in four Canadians will be over 65.
Age-friendly cities need physical accessibility as well as intergenerational tolerance. Creative Commons photo by Dr. Scott Crawford.
Glenn Miller, a planner with the Canadian Urban Institute and the founding editor of the Ontario Planning Journal, pointed out the varying needs of different age cohorts among seniors. Only half-joking, he referred to people between the ages of 55 to 64 as “seniors-in training”, while older cohorts face increasing challenges such as finding housing that accommodates their needs. Accessibility is a particular challenge for seniors living in car-dependent contexts like many areas of Canadian cities and suburbs. At a certain age, most seniors need to stop driving. Innovative public transportation services are needed to serve residents who cannot walk long distances, such as dial-a-ride jitney vans.
Kendra Fitzrandolph is a graduate student at York University researching planning for age-friendly communities. She referred our attention to the WHO Guide to Global Age Friendly Cities, which offers a checklist of essential features for age-friendly cities. Age-friendly cities offer social support infrastructure and health services for all ages as well as accessible physical design. Saanich (near Victoria, BC) is one Canadian city working to follow the WHO guide. Saanich has put forward social initiatives as well as physical design guidelines for wider sidewalks and wider hallways in apartment buildings.
May Wong, an expert in granting for community foundations, argued that there is a critical need for tolerance and cross-cultural dialogue between youth and the elderly. These groups have different backgrounds, values and levels of education. Surveys show that many elderly Canadians fear young people, believing that youth are involved in high levels of violent crime (this, happily, is not borne out by statistics). Meanwhile, youth are excluded from using shared public space for social activities like street hockey.
Sadly, racism is still endemic in Canadian workplaces. Older Canadians fear immigrants at a higher rate than other age groups. Ironically, as Glenn already pointed out, the cohort of working-age Canadians whose taxes support public services will represent a shrinking percentage of the population. Thus, immigration supporting workforce population growth is an essential part of the solution for accommodating an aging population.
Befitting the urgency of this topic, audience members had plenty of comments. One common theme is that social changes will be needed as well as coordinated interdisciplinary planning approaches. After all, it is more feasible for people of all ages to share limited public infrastructure like sidewalks respectfully than to retrofit the entire physical environment.
