Towards a Livable City for Elderlies

Abstract

Ageing is a serious problem all around the world, making lots of countries under fiscal and political pressures (United Nations report, 2015), so does China. As country who has the biggest population of ageing, reaching 0.241 billion (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2017), China faces the most severe conflicts between ageing society and transforming cities. However, the current services systems for elderlies is not sufficient enough for China's rapid growth of ageing group. The neighborhood services system, which takes up the biggest proportion of the existing genres of services systems for elderlies in China, depends on the quality of neighborhood. The level of integration of such services systems is also determined by the setup of the neighborhood. (Li Zhiming, 2016) This thesis aims at seeking a way to integrate the existing neighborhood services systems for elderlies in the historical area of first-tier cities in China. The proposal would turn the relationship between historical area and elderlies from mutually conflicting and exclusive to mutually beneficial. The new urban strategy would address to the existing problems of neighborhood-dependent services systems for elderlies, and the urban conflicts between historical area and elderlies' needs. The conceptual framework of the proposal would touch social, spatial, and governance aspects, based on the theories of environmental psychology, aged-friendly environments, aged-interacting environments, silver economy, participatory management, and participatory design. Changsha, a typical ageing, first-tier city in China, would be the example taken in this thesis for exploring the principles that can be used in other practices in a bottom-up way. There would be four stages—problem definition, problem description, solution proposals and reflection.