Spela Mocnik

Age-Friendly Neighbourhood Planning and Design Guidelines: A Singapore Case Study provides evidence-based research and examples of existing good practices on health-enabling, age-friendly neighbourhood provision. These relate to the planning and design of outdoor spaces and enabling opportunities for active, healthy ageing. Importantly, our research prioritises the need to engage with older people when creating neighbourhood environments that contribute to healthy ageing in place. The book and its supplementary toolkits touches on 3 main stages of age-friendly neighbourhood project — planning (environmental audit), implementation (planning and design guidelines) and evaluation of progress made (post-implementation review). We hope that these materials will contribute to the ongoing discourse of how to (re)envision urban neighbourhoods to enhance health and quality of life as people age. Needless to say, they do not supersede but support existing guidelines or regulations to improve everyday neighbourhood environment for healthy ageing in place. Co-creation with older people is a central tenet of our research on ageing urbanism at the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities. The Lee Li Ming Programme in Ageing Urbanism conducts applied research on built environment and health of ageing population, arguing for a more integrated environmental, social and spatial approach to identify the connection between the built environment, health and quality of life that can inform the design for age-friendly neighbourhoods and communities.

This book brings together the emerging body of work on age-friendly neighbourhoods in Singapore, the Asia-Pacific region, Europe and North America. It begins with an overview chapter on the current state of policy, practice and research on age-friendly neighbourhoods in Singapore. This is followed by an annotated bibliography of published materials on age-friendly neighbourhoods in the above-mentioned countries and regions, encompassing theoretical work and empirical research reported on in journal articles, books and conference proceedings. The annotations for Singapore also map the grey literature, including unpublished dissertations and theses. The aim is to provide a sense of the scope of, issues in, and discourse on age-friendly neighbourhoods, the development of which is increasingly being recognised as a key strategy to support healthy ageing and enhance quality of life in ageing societies.