Cross-National Perspectives on Aging and Place: Implications for Age-Friendly Cities and Communities.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The age-friendly cities and communities (AFCC) agenda has led to a range of policy initiatives aimed at supporting aging in place for older people. While there is case study evidence of how people age across urban contexts, there has been little research exploring cross-national understandings of age-friendly places among older people. The objective of this article is to identify the place experiences of older people living across cities and communities in India, Brazil, and the United Kingdom and to discuss implications for the AFCC agenda. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: A total of 300 semistructured interviews were undertaken with older people across 9 cities and 27 communities in India, Brazil, and the United Kingdom. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis undertaken by each national team and then discussed and revised at collaborative workshops with researchers from each of the 3 country teams. RESULTS: The data capture the ways in which place is constructed from the perspective of older people drawing upon social, community, and cultural dimensions of aging across diverse urban environments. We explore how older people negotiate place in the context of their everyday life and identify the relational and interconnected ways in which place attachment, belonging, and identity are constructed. DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS: Age-friendly interventions need to attend to the changing physical, social and cultural dimensions of aging and place. Integrated place-making practices are required to support older people to age in the right place across rapidly transforming urban contexts globally.

Una visión transdisciplinaria del envejecimiento / Aging: a transdisciplinary approach

El envejecimiento está cambiando nuestra forma de vivir y convivir, con implicancias tan amplias que su abordaje por nicho de especialidad es insuficiente, haciendo fundamental generar una mirada integradora, y obligando a la academia a reconstruir sus bordes. La investigación transdisciplinaria se puede definir como los esfuerzos realizados por investigadores de diferentes disciplinas que trabajan conjuntamente para crear nuevas innovaciones conceptuales, teóricas, metodológicas y de traducción que integran y se mueven más allá de los enfoques específicos de la disciplina para abordar un problema común. La Universidad de Chile conformó la Red Transdisciplinaria sobre envejecimiento, la que agrupa a académicos de diferentes ámbitos del conocimiento, que comparten un interés común por explorar el envejecimiento, promoviendo un abordaje integrado. En enero de 2018, se realizó la quinta Escuela Internacional de Verano sobre Envejecimiento de la Universidad de Chile, donde un grupo de expertos nacionales e internacionales provenientes de distintas disciplinas que incluyeron el diseño, la salud, el urbanismo, la sociología, el derecho, la ingeniería y la arquitectura, plantearon sus posiciones, estudios y evidencias científicas en relación a una meta habitual de las personas mayores: envejecer en su entorno. Las ponencias y reflexiones integradoras se describen en esta revisión.

Aging is changing the way we live, with implications so wide that its approach by specialty is insufficient, making essential to generate an integrative view, forcing the academy to rebuild its edges. Transdisciplinary research is defined as the efforts made by researchers from different disciplines who work together to create new conceptual, theoretical, methodological and translation innovations that integrate and move beyond the specific approaches of the discipline to address a common problem. The University of Chile formed the Transdisciplinary Network on Aging, allowing the interaction of academics from different fields of knowledge, who share a common interest in exploring aging, promoting an integrated approach. In January 2018, the fifth International Summer School on Aging was held at the University of Chile, where a group of national and international experts from different disciplines including design, health, urban planning, sociology, law, engineering and architecture, raised their positions, studies and scientific evidence in relation to a common goal of the elderly: aging in place. The presentations and integrative analyzes are described in this review.