Outdoor spaces and buildings, transportation, and social environments are domains of the World Health Organization’s holistic age-friendly agenda. To improve the quality of these domains, cities in The Netherlands, Poland and Romania aim to use age-friendly strategies and involve their citizens’ views and experiences in designing evaluation tools and policy plans.
There is a need for participatory approaches for older people and policymakers, and the City&Co project (https://cityco.snspa.ro/) co-created an innovative spatial tool – a geoportal – for a community-based assessment of the age-friendliness, that can be used in multiple cities. The geoportal has been developed using a co-creation design, and older adults have been involved in all stages of the process. We will explain the process and the challenges, revealing the role of a participatory approach in policy evaluation at the city level.
In a different stage of the project, older adults and policymakers from the 4 cities participating in the project: Bucharest (RO), Kracow and Wroclaw (PL), and den Hague (NL) were involved to co-create a policy plan using the data for each city gathered through the geoportal.
The session presents and discusses the design of the co-creation process, underling the importance of bringing together citizens and decision-makers in featuring what is needed in various urban communities and what will be the challenges of policy implementation, using a bottom-up approach and involving both the experts and the regular citizens in an experiential setting. The final goal of the session is to draft a Manifesto – as a foundation for the age-friendly agenda in the urban communities.
Our speaker: Loredana Ivan is a Professor at the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, Communication Department, Bucharest, Romania. She has a PhD in Sociology and a post-doctorate in Social Psychology. She was the chair of ENAS European Network of Aging Studies) between 2019 and 2022.
Loredana Ivan is a PI (RO) in the project https://cityco.snspa.ro/
