The city of Manchester in the UK provides a good example of how age-friendly programs in cities can be developed and what they can bring to their older inhabitants. Indeed, Manchester, which faces important challenges with regard to ageing inequalities, poverty, social exclusion and life expectancy, became in 2010 the first UK city to join the World Health Organization (WHO)’s age-friendly city programme. It has since then been leading the way to innovative strategies in that area.
The projects ‘Developing age-friendly cities‘ of the Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Ageing is based on the involvement of older people as co-researchers in order to develop a better understanding of what older people think is important to make their cities age-friendly and so have a clearer and deeper knowledge of how an age-friendly city community can be developed.
The participating co-researchers took part in the different phases of the research: the planning, design, data collection and implementation phases of the research process, seeking to reach out to the most vulnerable and excluded older persons in their communities.
A 15-minute film has just been launched about that project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXELgwHQ34o&feature=youtu.be
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