Our current work on age friendly environments is focused on exploring key elements of an age friendly built environment. This programme forms part of the Age Friendly Belfast action plan, coordinated by the Healthy Ageing Strategic Partnership.
Recent activity has included a Walkability Assessment for Healthy Ageing in Belfast — a pilot project which developed an age-friendly assessment tool to gauge how accessible the built environment is for older people. It was conducted as part of Belfast’s application to be a WHO Age-friendly city. Demonstrating a way of engaging with older people to gain their opinions and using their experience and knowledge, it enabled local older people to assess the walking environment in their area, using a tool developed following a review of relevant models and literature.
Key Recommendations
Key recommendations made by older people included:
- Engage older people in the design of their city
- Promote consistent provision of dropped kerbs and tactile paving
- Promote high quality and well maintained pavements
- Engage older people in design and planning provision of public seating
- Identify opportunities to review placement of pedestrian crossings and crossing times
The report provides more detail on the process and makes a full series of recommendations.
Walkability Assessment for Healthy Ageing Report
The next step for this project is to explore options for validating the tool, through engagement with academic partners and further piloting.