How Can the Lived Environment Support Healthy Ageing? A Spatial Indicators Framework for the Assessment of Age-Friendly Communities

The Age-Friendly Cities and Communities Guide was released by the World Health Organization over a decade ago with the aim of creating environments that support healthy ageing. The comprehensive framework includes the domains of outdoor spaces and buildings, transportation, housing, social participation, respect and inclusion, civic participation and employment, communication and information, and community and health services. A major critique of the age-friendly community movement has argued for a more clearly defined scope of actions, the need to measure or quantify results and increase the connections to policy and funding levers. This paper provides a quantifiable spatial indicators framework to assess local lived environments according to each Age-Friendly Cities and Communities (AFC) domain. The selection of these AFC spatial indicators can be applied within local neighbourhoods, census tracts, suburbs, municipalities, or cities with minimal resource requirements other than applied spatial analysis, which addresses past critiques of the Age-Friendly Community movement. The framework has great potential for applications within local, national, and international policy and planning contexts in the future

Network Structures: Working Differently and Changing Expectations

There is a growing need for innovative methods of dealing with complex, social problems. New types of collaborative efforts have emerged as a result of the inability of more traditional bureaucratic hierarchical arrangements such as departmental programs to resolve these problems. Network structures are one such arrangement that is at the forefront of this movement. Although collaboration through network structures establishes an innovative response to dealing with social issues, there remains an expectation that outcomes and processes are based on traditional ways of working. It is necessary for practitioners and policy makers alike to begin to understand the realities of what can be expected from network structures in order to maximize the benefits of these unique mechanisms

Child-friendly third places

This chapter focuses on the notion of child-friendly third places where a variety of standout features attract children to play and inhabit. The critical scholarship on understanding child-friendly cities has increased in proportion with the growing interest in the effects of the built and natural environments on children’s well-being. The growing importance of these third places to facilitate children’s play is gradually becoming more acknowledged amongst this scholarship given increasingly constrained urban public places and amenities. Particular attention is given to the child-friendly urban precinct of South Bank Parklands in Brisbane, Australia where a diversity of third places continue to attract significant patronage

Shredding the Evidence: Whose Collective Impact are We Talking About?

There has been considerable hype in Australia recently accompanying the North American-informed Collective Impact (CI) approach and its claims to deliver real transformative social change for individuals and communities. CI actively promotes its principal incentive and distinctive trait, namely to concentrate the energies of its collaborators to achieve real,long-term,measurable and sustainable outcomes, often quoted as a Social Return on Investment(SRoI).Not coincidentally,the rise of CI’s visibility has emerged alongside diminishing public funding for social change initiatives, with a corresponding and somewhat belated turn to the philanthropic sector to partially meet this funding shortfall. Early signs across Australia indicate that philanthropic funds are no less driven by a ‘value for money’ imperative than governments that in turn, has left many lamenting the shift in community organisations working to satisfy donor expectations rather than working with and for local communities. In this context,some serious questions have already been raised about the Collective Impact approach and ambition, particularly how CI can meaningfully engage with long-term disadvantaged local communities and realistically agree on what successful outcomes would look like for such communities. Community cultural development (CCD) would seem to offer a useful counterpoint to the CI approach with its enduring emphasis on authentic process and bottom-up solutions but CCD too has received its own share of criticism for an obsession with process to the exclusion of real and tangible social outcomes. Whatever approach’s claims are to be tested, this paper starts from the standpoint that their veracity will only be significant if they can actually demonstrate they are making a difference in our most disadvantaged communities and populations

More than fun: capitalising sport's social goods

The twenty-first century has already seen a stream of premature epitaphs written for many long-standing social phenomena, not least social capital – often referred to as the ‘glue’ that binds us together. I eagerly jumped on that bandwagon at the turn of the century, worried about signs of weakening social connectedness. At that time, Harvard Professor Robert Putnam, in his bestseller Bowling Alone (Simon & Schuster, 2001), persuasively traced the consequences of weakening social and civic ties in middle America. I haven’t really gotten off that wagon, although I’ve never felt completely comfortable with some of my fellow traveller’s laments about the state of the world and declining stocks of social capital

Measuring up?: Assessing the liveability of Australian Cities

The State of Australian Cities (SOAC) national conferences have been held biennially since 2003 to support interdisciplinary policy-related urban research. This paper was presented at SOAC 4 held in Perth from 24 to 27 November 2009. SOAC 4 was hosted by the University of Western Australia, Curtin University, Edith Cowan University and Murdoch University and held at The University of Western of Australia’s Crawley campus.SOAC 4 was a collaborative venture between colleagues from the planning, geography and related disciplines across the four public universities. The meta-theme of this conference - city growth, sustainability, vitality and vulnerability – sought to capture the dynamic and complex nature and contexts in which Australian cities find themselves in the early 21st century. The last decade or so has seen Australian cities and many of their residents benefit from significant economic prosperity. With this economic prosperity, largely on the back of a resources boom, Australian cities and resources and mineral-rich regions, particularly in Queensland and in WA, have been subjected to profound demographic, social, economic, environmental and political changes. In the wake of the so-called ‘global financial crisis’ we have witnessed the rise of what might be called ‘neo-Keynesianism’ as various liberal democratic nations have pumped billions of dollars into their national economies via ‘bail outs’ or a stimulus package’ in an effort to stave off economic recession. The economic prosperity and more recent uncertainty that has been experienced in the last decade provides a fascinating and dare we say it a timely backdrop to critically reflect on the condition of urban Australia. All published papers have been subject to a peer reviewing process

Child-Friendly Cities: Critically Exploring the Evidence Base of a Resurgent Agenda

The State of Australian Cities (SOAC) national conferences have been held biennially since 2003 to support interdisciplinary policy-related urban research. This paper was presented at SOAC 3 held in Adelaide from 28 to 30 November 2007. SOAC 3 was jointly hosted by the University of South Australia, the University of Adelaide and Flinders University. Themes and Key Persons SOAC 3 focused on the contemporary form and structure of Australian cities. The conference proceedings were grouped into six key sub-themes, each the focus of one of more conference sessions: City Economy - economic change and labour market outcomes of globalisation, land use pressures, changing employment locations. Social City – including population, migration, immigration, polarisation, equity and disadvantage, housing issues, recreation. City Environment - sustainable development, management and performance, natural resource management, limits to growth, impacts of air, water, climate, energy consumption, natural resource uses, conservation, green space. City Structures – the emerging morphology of the city – inner suburbs, middle suburbs, the CBD, outer suburbs and the urban-rural fringe, the city region. City Governance – including taxation, provision of urban services, public policy formation, planning, urban government, citizenship and the democratic process. City Infrastructure – transport, mobility, accessibility, communications and IT, and other urban infrastructure provision. Paper Review Process Conference papers published from SOAC 3 were produced through a process of integrated peer review. There were originally 147 abstracts proposed, 143 were invited to submit papers and 107 papers were finally published