Canadian Urban Institute

 

Although the principles of Age Friendly Communities have since been adopted by hundreds of cities and towns across Canada, a new report from the Canadian Urban Institute (CUI) asks why AFC is being implemented mostly by public health and community service departments and agencies rather than municipal planning departments and other agencies responsible for the quality of the built environment.

 

Marni Cappe, President of the Canadian Institute of Planners, and a member of the Board of the CUI, notes that, “While it has become a cliché to describe the aging of the population as the key demographic trend of the coming decade, we continue to seek better ways to accommodate the needs of this growing segment of the population.”  She further suggests that “Planners across Canada should pay attention to this new report prepared by the Canadian Urban Institute which knits together some of our most familiar planning practices with the principles of age-friendly communities.”

 

The CUI’s report, funding for which was provided by the Division of Aging and Seniors of the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), suggests a number of ways that the ideas inherent in AFC could be adapted to make them more useful to planning departments. A key challenge is that planners are not typically accountable for most of the areas covered by AFC. For example, only a few of the eight AFC “domains” relate specifically to the built environment (transportation, housing, and outdoor spaces and buildings) while others (such as “respect and social inclusion” and “community support and health services”) are usually the responsibility of other municipal departments and agencies not directly involved in planning activities. 

As well, the CUI reports suggests, at present it is not clear how AFC concepts can be integrated into the approvals process for new projects.

 

“Our report suggests that a new version of AFC is needed that is tailored to specific scales. This would allow a project to be assessed in the context of a block or neighbourhood so as to better address varying levels of mobility among older adults,” says Glenn Miller, vice president of education and research with the CUI and principal author of the report.  “Age-friendly at the community scale looks after the needs of the young as well as the elderly,” he adds.

 

Integrating AFC ideas with the development approvals process would also mitigate another concern – which is that the AFC model may be competing with other models or perceived as competing with other concepts such as Smart Growth and New Urbanism that are already well entrenched in planning practice.

 

For more information, please contact Glenn Miller.

To download the English or French PDF of the study, please access our Publication Archives here.