Aligning Policy, Place and Public Value: Planning Age Friendly Cities in Municipal Organizations

ABSTRACT

Municipalities are important to age-friendly policy implementation and need to be engaged to bring about the desired physical changes and community supports. As a governing unit, municipalities can allocate resources and leverage their capacity by acting in certain ways. As a planning process, age-friendly policies should be embedded in all levels of municipal government to ensure that maximum public benefits can be leveraged. Three strategies effectively illustrate the opportunity toward internal municipal collaboration: analytic mapping enables policy makers to visualize the captured value of public amenities; policy mapping reveals where departments are reinforcing or contradicting age-friendly policy actions; and effective advocacy builds public support and guides municipal agenda setting. San Antonio, Texas, provides a context to illustrate how the strategies can be implemented to further the goal of age-friendly planning as demonstrated through their commitment and designation as an AARP Age-Friendly Community. This replicable framework will help cities pursing age-friendly policy action to forge connections across departments, policy makers, community partners, and the public toward broader policy implementation.

Key Points

• Age-friendly planning should not fall to local departments of senior services only.

• Planning coordination of age-friendly policy results in more diverse outcomes.

• Mapping is a tool helping policy makers visualize alternative opportunities.

• Maps give stakeholders the ability to track and monitor progress.

This approach is easily replicable for cities implementing age-friendly programs.

KEYWORDS:

• Age-friendly cities
• aging in place
• aging
• planning
• local government

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data Availability

Data from the survey are openly available in a public repository that issues data sets with DOIs.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the City of San Antonio, Texas [GF-40012].