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A global effort to understand what works locally.
The Age-Friendly Cities project is a global initiative of the World Health Organization (WHO). It is aimed at understanding what characteristics make a city age-friendly and, conversely, what characteristics constitute barriers to age-friendliness. The project began in 2006 and ultimately included thirty-five cities in twenty-two countries from North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia. The only U.S. city represented in the original data collection was Portland, Oregon, although researchers in New York City participated by analyzing the global data and later collecting data in New York City.
The WHO's Age-Friendly Cities project was conceived and embraced in June of 2005 at the World Congress of Gerontology and Geriatrics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The project was developed in response to the rapid pace of population aging throughout the world, in an effort to ensure that societies adequately address the needs of older people and promote their contributions.
The goal of the project was "to help cities make the most of an ever growing older population" (see the project website at www.who.int/ ageing/ age-friendly -cities/ en/index.html). One intended outcome was a...