Ageing in Europe. Reclaiming a Healthy and Age-friendly City

Asother parts of the Western worldand the so-called developing countries, Europeis experiencing a progressive increase in life expectancy, a phenomenon which, along withan equally significant drop in the birth rate,sees theElderly making up a growingshare of the population.In brief, cities are both growing and ageing at an incredibly fast pace. This creates a rise in demand for services, opportunities and rights, for which the urban planning and government policies appear poorly prepared. However, this is not merely a question of numbers. The significant quantitative change matches with a substantial transformation of the Elderly‟s social representation and the meaning we assign to the condition of being elderly, which is no longer considered as residual to active adult life, but a new phase full of opportunities as well as of limits and difficulties. The potential benefits of this condition depend, however, on a particular combination of factors, includingthe personal and socio-material resources available to each individual. This is an important point, given that socio-economic and cultural conditions, as well as health, areinfluencing factors of the progressive internal diversification in relation to the growth of the elderly population. Even with respect to the goal of building a healthy and age-friendly city, it is necessary to encourage gentle and responsible logics of interventionxvii.These must be able to setup virtuous processes, with a gradual impact and an underlying prospective vision of the directions of change, of the importance to invest in citizens‟ learning ability and responsibility. These are interventions that aim at laying down roots to build the permanent conditions for a truly smart and inclusive city.