Most of us are going to grow old in cities

With the number of older people steadily increasing, why aren’t we designing our cities to be age-friendly?

I was running a futures workshop recently, and someone put up a virtual post-it note for the year 2030. It read: ‘Planning policy requires Age-Friendly Homes’.

I thought, great call. And then I thought, why should we have to wait till 2030 for this, when we’ve known about our ageing population for decades?

I always counsel that the future is impossible to predict and that we need to prepare for multiple potential outcomes. But one area where we have a reasonable amount of certainty is demographics. We can see change coming a long way off: the youth bulge in the Middle East, the global growth of the urban middle class, or ageing populations in the developed world.

A predictable future

By mid-century, globally, there will be more peoople over 65 than children under 15. And, because our world is urbanising, most of those people will live in cities. In the UK, by 2030, one in five people in the UK will be aged 65.

In countries like mine with an increasingly elderly population, there is a growing need for age-friendly infrastructure and there will be growing pressure on governments to spend money.

with an increasingly elderly population, there is a growing need for age-friendly infrastructure

Given that these changes are entirely predictable, are national and local governments planning adequately for the future in which more and more of us will grow old living in cities? Why, according to the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), is new housing is being built with little regard to the needs of our ageing population?

What should an age-friendly city be like?

Of course older people are not a homogenous group, and they will have different needs in different places and at different times of their lives. In the UK we do know that elders in cities are less likely to drive, favouring public transport and walking. So they need accessible, affordable and frequent public transport that connects the parts of the city they need, not just the commuter routes.

As we grow older, we often spend more time in our homes and communities, so our immediate environment has a significant impact on our health and wellbeing. Good green space and high-quality public realm (with facilities like seating and toilets) are important, as are level pavements and safe crossings.

Most people don’t want to move in old age. Elders will need a wider range of accessible and affordable housing options to remain independent and connected to their communities. For centuries we have built our urban houses with lots of steps and steep stairs. Existing housing stock will need to be adapted to provide homes that are acessible and warm: programmes to improve the energy efficiency of homes — as well as being vital for tackling climate change — bring benefits to older people, too many of whom live in fuel poverty.

older people may benefit from increasingly popular concepts like ‘the 15-minute city’

Access to local shops and services is also important, and older people may benefit from increasingly popular concepts like ‘the 15-minute city’ where the aim is to offer citizens what they need on their doorstep, with grocery shops and cafes, parks and and health centres, a walk away. Toyama in Japan where 30% of residents are over 70, has adopted a ‘Compact City Strategy’ based on great public transport and encouraging people back in to a revitalised city centre.

Staying in the city

In the past it was assumed that those elders who could afford to wanted to move to the suburbs, live a gated village, or buy a bungalow on the coast. However, an increasing number can’t afford to move and many want to be close to their families and friends, and stay in the communities in which they raised their children.

Figures from the American Association of Retired Persons indicate that 90% of older adults prefer to stay in their homes or communities for as long as they can. In the US, many towns and cities are adopting the concept of ‘aging in place’. That might mean a resident chooses to remain in their home as they grow older, or they might downsize to a smaller home within that same community.

Helping people grow old well in cities can contribute to the health of the city itself

For those who want to move, half say they are prevented from moving by the lack of housing options. People being trapped in homes that don’t suit their needs, particularly family-sized homes, is not only bad for them, but is exacerbating the housing crisis.

Helping people grow old well in cities can contribute to the health of the city itself. Older generations have a huge amount to give and too many urban areas — particularly city-centres — have become mono-cultural, dominated by young people and verticle drinking. Multi-generational communities can have a civilising effect.Bringing older and younger people together can also help tackle the loneliness epidemic. In the Netherlands, university students are living for free in retirement homes, benefitting both age groups.

Across the world, hundreds of cities have signed up to the World Health Organisation ‘Age Friendly City’ programme to create physical and social environments that allow people to remain healthy, independent and autonomous long into their old age.

In the UK, there are positive steps. Manchester: wants to be ‘A Great Place to Grow Older’ with age-friendly neighbourhoods and services, and getting more old people enjoying culture in the city. ‘Bristol Ageing Better’ wants the city to be a brilliant place to grow old and is working to reduce social isolation among older people. Hundreds of businesses in Nottingham have signed up to the city’s ‘Take a Seat’ scheme, where a “We are age-friendly” sticker in shops tells older people that they are welcome to have a rest.

Multiple benefits from designing for old people.

When designing cities, what is good for old people can be positve for all generations. Legible signage, accessible buildings and walkable neighbourhoods can benefit everyone. A physically less able person or a parent with a buggy face many of the same hurdles navigating the city as older residents. Old and young want access to affordable public transport and safe, pleasant public and green space in which to socialise.

what is good for old people can be positve for all generations

Age UK have produced a great guide for designing age-friendly places. Allowing people to keep socially and economically active for longer also reduces dependence on public services and relieves pressure on over-stretched council budgets.

The Future of ageing

What does the future look like for ageing in cities? Autonomous vehicles will be with us and — as long as they’re not just targeted at the young and rich — could be a huge benefit for older people unable to drive, helping them stay active and participate in city-life. Digital tools, like social media and virtual reality can enable different kinds of interactions, building peer-to-peer relationships and allowing health diagnostics and care to be delivered at home.

Networked environments with sensors on our streets and in our cars, offices, homes — even our bodies — can measure how older people are getting on and support independent living. And we’re likely to see more innovations in assistive technologies like pill dispensers, memory aids, even exoskeletons, that help people overcome .particular challenges.

It is crucial that old people are involved in creating these future solutions

The design and redesign of homes and neighbourhoods will increasingly respond to needs of different generations, built for a lifetime but adaptable for different needs. Local authorities will continue to innovate, incentivising the development of age-friendly housing and ensuring that local plans are specific about housing older people and allocate sites for a variety of age-friendly options.

It is crucial that old people are involved in creating these future solutions. Too often technology innovation and urban design is exclusive and fetishises youth. Older people should be able to co-design the technologies, communities, and services that will affect them.

Redesigning the city

As we emerge from the covid pandemic, lots of urban buildings and spaces are going to need to find a new function. In the UK, there will be less demand for retail space and offices in many parts of our cities. In the US, redundant shoppping malls and strip-malls are already being repurposed for senior housing. Apartment-living in cities can make a lot of sense for elders concerned with accessability and access to amenities. And it can make a lot of sense to city administrations wanting to re-imagine their city centres.

Planning in advance for this ageing future is a big opportunity for businesses, a growing market for the property sector, and a prudent financial strategy for city administrations. And why wouldn’t all of us advocate for age-friendly cities? We’re growing older every day, (my kids delight in reminding me of my advancing years), and that future is coming for us all.

Will Our Smart Cities Be Green Cities?

Cities in the UK are great places to live. But they also face challenges: congested roads, polluted air, hotter summers, and ageing infrastructure. And with local authority budgets being chopped, resources to sort out these problems are scarce. 

As well as suffering negative environmental impacts, cities are a major contributor to those very problems. Globally, cities occupy 0.5% of the world’s land area, consume 75% of natural resources, and account for 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions. 

City administrations, businesses, and third-sector organisations have been exploring how they can harness smart cities approaches to solve complex urban challenges. 

Digital technology is becoming pervasive, embedded in buildings, in vehicles, in infrastructure. Nearly everyone carries a smart phone around. This allows us to understand the city better and interact with it differently, with potential sustainability benefits. 

There are obvious gains in efficiency. Tracking how people move, how energy is consumed, and how resources flow, can allow better management of infrastructure and reduce wastage. City lighting, for example, can shine when, where, and how people actually want it. 

And pervasive connectivity also brings dynamic, positive feedback loops. Navigation Apps like CityMapper not only help people to move around cities in low-carbon ways, they also provide a rich source of data that can be used to optimise the system or provide new services, like smart-buses.  

The growth of the Internet of Things will mean that these measuring and management systems will increasingly operate in real-time, allowing smart grids to balance energy supply and demand or nudging drivers and cyclists away from areas of high congestion or bad air quality. 

Virtualisation of products and services can bring dematerialisation and less demand for production, storage and travel. Just as Spotify replaces the trip to buy a physical disk, MOOcs allow the teaching to come to the student, while remote diagnostics can save multiple trips the clinic. 

Smart city tools, can also change behaviours and attitudes. Digital platforms are enabling the sharing economy - car clubs, co-working, peer-to-peer exchange. Energy Apps are allowing people to interact with their central heating. Making walking or cycling options easier are can embed sustainable behaviours.  

Such changes will not, however, happen, automatically. There can be rebound effects: if energy is cheaper, people value it less; if congestion decreases, people drive more. There can be displacement effects, spreading demand more efficiently across time and space may increase the total load. And Connectivity in itself may mean we just move more and consume more. For example on ‘Singles Day’ in China last year Alibaba recorded $25.3 billion of sales within 24 hours, 80% on mobile phones. 

To make the sustainability gains a reality will require:  

• policy underpinning, and dynamic nudge activities; 

• new financing mechanisms to capture the value of externalities and urban public goods; 

• technology development to focus on pressing planetary issues rather than more and quicker ways to get a pizza 24/7; 

• public authorities and citizens to have the skills to engage with and shape smart technologies. 

The need for these solutions is pressing. The global market is immense. And there is a triple prize: growing our businesses, protecting our environment, and making our cities better for everyone.

This article was originally published buy techuk.org as part of #GreenWeek

What To Do With The Urban Spaces Technology Makes Obsolete

What should be the proactive response to the digital transformation of cities? Peter Madden, OBE, gives some suggestions. This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/what-to-do-with-the-urban-spaces-technology-makes-obsolete_uk_5addefe1e4b0ef320b5c2f0a

Digital tech will make many city spaces redundant: artificial intelligence doesn’t care where it works; autonomous vehicles don’t care they where they park. These spaces must be repurposed for cities to thrive in the future.

Obsolete Urban Spaces

I recounted in last month’s blog how ride hailing and self-driving cars will dramatically reduce the space needed for parking, how online retail will leave shops struggling, how traditional offices will be replaced by flexible, cloud-based working.

Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is already on this, announcing that his next company will take distressed real estate assets - like abandoned strip malls, parking lots or factories - and turn them into spaces suited for new industries, such as food delivery or online retail. “There are over $10 trillion in these real estate assets that will need to be repurposed for the digital era in the coming years,” he wrote.

Rethinking What Cities Are For

If city centres are to remain vibrant in the 21stCentury, they will need more than Kalanick’s pervasive infrastructure for preparing and delivering on-demand meals. This is an opportunity to ask what people want from their cities and how redundant spaces can meet these needs.

There have been multiple academic studies and marketing surveys on this, and they boil down to two main things. Citizens first want the basics: employment opportunities, affordable housing, good transport, and safe streets. Further up the hierarchy of needs, they also care about the physical appearance of the city, including the availability of parks and green spaces, the feel of the city in terms of openness, diversity and social interaction, and the experience in the city whether that’s tasting new foods, buying an unexpected gift, or discovering a new band.

Re-Greening

The places that were once reserved for cars can be spaces for pedestrians and bike lanes, with walkable and cycle-friendly cities offering cheaper transit, healthier citizens, and stronger communities. Greenery could flourish, with new parks, trees and allotments providing access to nature, sponges to absorb flood-water and urban cooling in a warming world.

Flexible Working

Who really wants a lengthy commute to a regimented workplace? Future office spaces will harness new technology to help people work flexibly, collaboratively and from multiple locations. When they do travel into the city centre office, this will be oriented around the experience of the individual employee, beautifully designed, technologically responsive, with different spaces for how they work best at different times of the day and on different tasks.

Making in Cities

The 4th industrial revolution allows manufacturing to return to urban centres for just-in-time, on demand and hyper-personalised production. Some ‘on-shoring’ is already happening, with McLaren car chassis, Clarks boots and Frog bikes being made again in British towns again. Data analytics, virtual reality, new materials, robotics and 3D printing will make it possible to produce or customise things on the high-street, right where the consumer wants them.

Affordable Housing

Unused buildings and empty land will be filled by new types of housing. In my home city, Bristol, a redundant building in a parade of shops is being turned into living space for the homeless, AEOB will ‘buy and convert empty offices into homes for people’, and ‘We Can Make’ is offering affordable prefabricated houses for empty urban plots. Housing innovations like this are springing up in cities across the world.

Shopping As Theatre

People won’t go to city-centre shops just to buy things, but because of the experience, to check out the brand and be part of the theatre. On London’s Regent Street, Apple and Burberry are pioneering this new approach to shopping, mediated by new technology and blending the real and virtual worlds. Personalization, mobile technology, and the internet of things will help keep physical stores alive.

Change Is Coming

Maintaining the vibrancy of existing urban centres will mean re-greening cities and suburbs, establishing digital manufacturing in the heart of the city, and helping people to live, work, and shop in urban neighbourhoods. Digital technology will disrupt cities, but it will also enable these new urban uses to emerge.

Digital Tech Is Transforming The Physical Shape Of Our Cities

Smart city technologies are going to change how we use – and value – property in profound ways, writes Peter Madden. This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/digital-tech-is-changing-where-we-do-things-transforming_uk_5aa29326e4b022280876fdf6

We know that smart city technologies are transforming how we shop, work and travel. They are also changing how we use land and property, with a profound impact on the vibrancy and shape of our cities.

Disappearing shops

The rise and rise of online shopping will continue to hit shopping streets and retail parks. In the US, a quarter of shopping malls are predicted to close in the next five years. The UK is not as over-supplied with retail as it’s Transatlantic cousin, but traditional high streets and shopping centres will see lots more shops – especially clothing outlets – pulling down the shutters in 2018. Jobs will be lost, local authority revenues will fall, and boarded up high-streets will drag down the wider neighbourhood.

Empty offices

The digital revolution is changing how and where work happens. Employment is becoming more flexible and fluid, with digital technology enabling more people to work remotely and to collaborate in the cloud. This will impact city-centre offices, with landlords having to adjust to weaker demand and shorter leases. And as artificial intelligence bites – machines don’t care where they work – we’ll see the growth of cheaper regional back-offices, which is bad news for expensive cities.

No more parking

Some of the biggest impacts will come from changes to how we travel. The car shaped our cities in the 20th Century, with suburbs, ring roads, and out-of town shopping centres. I expect car-sharing, ride hailing and on-demand autonomous vehicles to have similar impacts in the 21st Century. It’s estimated that, today, as much as half of American cities’ land area is dedicated to the car: streets, driveways, expressways, parking lots, service stations and so on. In my home city of Bristol, as elsewhere, cars enjoy some of the best harbour views and the most desirable spots in central squares.

When people don’t need to own cars, or pay for parking, valuable land will be freed-up in cities for housing and commercial uses. Real estate company JLL has identified over 10,000 car parks in the UK’s towns and cities that could accommodate 400,000 new homes - enough to house a million people. In the suburbs, streetscapes will transform as parked cars disappear.

Shortening distances

Currently, people pay more for being close to good public transport links, and this is reflected in house-prices. Self-driving cars and ride hailing services like Uber will change this, making other neighbourhoods more accessible. And if these car-based ways of getting around also undermine public transport, house prices will adjust further. Autonomous vehicles may flatten property values across cities, with a reduction on the premium people pay for proximity to public transport.

The price penalty for a long commute might also reduce. If you can sleep, work, or watch TV during your car journey, you might be happy commuting for longer distances. Urban planners who have been fighting against sprawl for decades may see it get worse. And if, as one local authority leader put it to me, the ‘wealth sleeps elsewhere’, city administrations will lose council tax revenue on top of what they’ll lose from parking fees.

The virtual transforms the physical

Digital technology will make many spaces obsolete. With facial recognition, chatbots, mobile ticketing, and automatic payments, we can say bye-bye to ticket offices and barriers in transport, and bye-bye to tills and check-outs in shops. We can also expect virtualisation to hit healthcare and education, just as it’s now hitting shopping, reducing the need for some of the big university, and hospital buildings.

Smart city technologies are going to change how we use – and value – property in profound ways. For citizens, obsolete office space and vacant parking lots should mean more land available for much-needed housing. And the that fact that digital technology will probably have a levelling effect on property values, may redistribute wealth to poorer areas within, and between, cities.

Local authorities in charge of city centres will need to grasp that the revenue coming from the current physical location of things – parked cars, shops, and offices ― may evaporate, leaving a sizeable hole in their finances. City leaders will have to understand how much the digital is going to transform the physical, and that they need to shape their cities proactively, finding imaginative new uses for vacant land and buildings.

Peter Madden, OBE

Will Smart Cities Inevitably Worsen Social Inequality?

Positive action will be required to ensure that smart city solutions don’t just favour the already wealthy and connected Peter Madden OBE writes on 'Will Smart Cities Inevitably Worsen Social Inequality' in the Huffington Post. (This article originally appeared here: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/will-smart-cities-inevitably-worsen-social-inequality_uk_5a689271e4b06bd14be506e4 )

Our world is becoming more unequal. The disparities are perhaps most evident in our cities, where rich and poor are often neighbours, with slums standing in the shadow of skyscrapers. Large cities are less equal than the nations that host them – as well as being more unequal than smaller towns.

While smart cities can potentially benefit all citizens through increased efficiency, critics say that the application of digital technologies in the urban realm – far from addressing these divisions - will increase social inequality still further.

A lot of smart city initiatives, they say, are very top-down, devised and driven by corporate, techno-centric agendas that don’t generally even consider inequality, let alone how to reduce it.

When a process is made ‘smarter’ and more efficient, employment will change, and there will be losers. And the automation that will come from the urban Internet of Things will particularly threaten jobs for the lower-skilled. Cleaners, drivers and warehousing staff may be the first to find their jobs replaced by robots.

Big data and Artificial Intelligence control more and more of what is happening in cities. Decisions by algorithms - job application screening, health insurance premiums, targeted ads from payday loan companies - may exacerbate inequalities. Cathy O’Neil, warns in her book ‘Weapons of Math Destruction’ that algorithms are allowed to judge and differentiate between those who are ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ without being visible, accountable or in any way regulated, and that this is highly discriminatory.

And smart cities, cannot be smart for everyone simultaneously. Alexandros Washburn, former Chief Urban Designer for New York reminds us that “A city is a communal creation, and a city cannot perform from everyone’s perspective as if they were the only one that mattered. The light cannot turn green in both directions. The elevator cannot be waiting at every floor. Decisions have to be made about which direction and which floor, and those decisions, even in small ways, effectively create winners and losers”.

These discriminatory tendencies of smart technologies are worsened by the digital divide. What about those who simply don’t have access to digital services? According to the Office for National Statistics, in 2017, 4.8 million adults in the UK had never used the internet and 22% of disabled adults hadn’t either. And it’s those with the lowest income that are least likely to have access. Offline households are missing out on estimated savings of £500 per year from shopping and paying bills online, not to mention access to jobs, social interaction and government services.

Positive action will be required to ensure that smart city solutions don’t just favour the already wealthy and connected.

Digital inclusion is, fortunately, a solvable problem and is moving in the right direction. In cities across the developing world, connectivity is soaring. Mobile phones allow people to use digital payment services, benefit from e-learning, and access primary health care. In the UK, smart-phone penetration has hit 85% of the adult population and is continuing to rise, free wifi is spreading across cities, and more and more older people are getting online.

The ‘civic tech’ movement is working to direct technology to more progressive outcomes. In New York, Civic Hall uses collaboration and inclusive design to develop digital tools for the public good. In the UK, ‘Tech for Good’ promotes ‘tech with humankind in mind’. And there are initiatives to make smart cities work for citizens, like the Smart Citizen platform, and the citizen-sensing tools from The Bristol Approach. And, of course, a number of start-ups are focusing on improvements, such as more efficient public transport or better air quality, which may disproportionately benefit the poorer sectors of society.

Unfortunately, support for citizen-innovation is dwarfed by the funds going into R&D and new commercial initiatives that are blind to social impacts. Regulators, too, are more focused on the ability of companies to compete in markets on an equal basis, rather than the ability of citizens to participate in their smart cities on an equal basis.

Smart-city technology will tend to increase social inequalities unless proactively directed to deliver positive outcomes. As well as investing in equitable solutions, decision-makers in companies and governments will need to move a way from the tech-determinism and instrumental thinking that dominates today. Instead, they should ask what kind of life we want to lead, what values we want to uphold, and how can technology contribute to that?

Peter Madden, OBE