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Age- and Child-Friendly Cities and the Promise of

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Age- and Child-Friendly Cities and the

Promise of Intergenerational Space
Simon Biggs & Ashley Carr
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Promise of Intergenerational Space, Journal of Social Work Practice: Psychotherapeutic Approaches
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 Journal of Social Work Practice, 2015
Vol. 29, No. 1, 99–112, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02650533.2014.993942

Simon Biggs and Ashley Carr

AGE- AND CHILD-FRIENDLY CITIES AND

THE PROMISE OF INTERGENERATIONAL
SPACE
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Descriptions of age-friendly and child-friendly cities exhibit similarities and differences, yet
both are essential if we are to develop an understanding of intergenerational space. It is
argued that combining age-based priorities and the possibilities for generational empathy
provide a way of reintroducing intergenerational relations as key to the debate on the future
of the City. By shifting the focus or debate towards a critical understanding of
intergenerational relations, a way forward is suggested that draws on the work of Guy Debord
and on contemporary debates about environments ‘for all ages’. Seen through a life course
lens, the urban environment becomes instrumental in shifting debate, away from the fixed
needs of work and consumption and towards a more flexible creation of urban time and space
that includes social and emotional aspects of intergenerational belonging and community.

Keywords age-friendly; child-friendly; active ageing; intergenerational; social

policy; urban design; identity

Introduction

It is possible to see a city as a concretion of certain channels of social relationship. It is a

complex set of arrangements, set in wood, brick, concrete and stone, which reflect and
continue to shape the way people behave and interact over time and in space. The
urban environment is continually being remade in response to changing priorities, a
process that both determines the possibilities for social engagement and makes a
statement about how urban dwellers aspire to live with each other. Citizens are, of
course, not equal in their ability to affect the shape a city takes, and the degree to which
this complexity is expressed reflects the interests of different groups with different
degrees of power. Power relations are pertinent to interaction between age groups,
and in this paper, we look at age and generation as reflected in urban environments.
The two groups we are most interested in are children and older adults. We examine
how they are reflected in social policy statements about urban environments, and as
such we interrogate public policy as an overt way in which perspectives on age and
generation are made visible to us and legitimise certain forms of relationship.

q 2015 GAPS
 100 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

If urban spaces are designed with certain groups in mind, principally adults of
working age, either as producers or as consumers, then the question arises, how far are
other groups taken into account, in terms of inclusion or separation and their
importance to the main project of urban life. Age and generation are interesting in this
regard because they add a longitudinal dimension to the use of urban space which
reflects personal life course time, rather than, on the one hand, time-of-day use and on
the other, historical time. One is arguably too short, though repetitious, and the other
is too long on a time frame, though a source of spatial determination, to catch the
impact on and of human development across a lifetime. The extent to which urban
environments are planned for future use, to affect future functioning as well as
intergenerational relations in the here and now, is also an important factor that requires
critical assessment when examining the way in which intergenerational relations are
conceived. Sometimes it is important to look at the periphery to determine the
underlying assumptions on which the centre is built. This is particularly true when
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examining the two ‘ends’ of the life course: Age and Childhood.

Age-friendly and child-friendly approaches to urban

environments
According to the UN (2012), about 3.6 billion people currently live in urban areas,
with this figure expected to grow to about 6.3 billion by 2050 and account for
approximately two-thirds of the world’s total population. Such growth is occurring
unevenly, both geographically and demographically, with a ‘youth bulge’ expected to
occur in the demographic profile of developing countries, primarily amongst slum/
shanty dwellers (UNFPA, 2007). However, the general global trend is one of ageing.
WHO (2007) claims that between 2006 and 2050, the world’s population of older
adults will double from 11% to 22%, with the developing world expected to age at a
faster rate than developed countries. Making cities and communities age-friendly has
emerged as an attractive policy response to these twin challenges of population ageing
and urban growth. Like UNICEF’s Child-Friendly Cities model that pre-dated it,
WHO’s Age-Friendly Cities project examines the hazards and opportunities of urban
living to develop an optimal urban environment. Unlike other urban development
models, optimal living is constructed around age and age-based needs. While the two
hold in common a re-conceptualisation of urban space according to age, and move
beyond the physical to consider social needs, rarely have they been discussed together.
To do so exposes important similarities, but also differences.
The WHO Age-friendly cities project was launched in 2006, though the ideas
central to its formation, active ageing, had already been in circulation and has formed
the underlying rationale for the approach. It is possible to read ‘Age friendly Cities’ as
one answer to the question, articulated in the WHO document ‘Active Ageing’
(2002): how to provide older adults with health, participation and security, in urban
environments. During the 1990s, the concept gained considerable ground amongst
international organisations, individual states and in the academy and represented a
unique response to demographic change, one that was able to incorporate new and
developing concepts of ageing and operate at different levels of society (Walker,
2009). An attractive feature of age friendliness was that it proposed a ‘holistic vision of
 THE PROMISE OF INTERGENERATIONAL SPACE 101

personal development’, which consisted of eight inter-related factors of urban living:

the built environment, transport, housing, social participation, respect and social
inclusion, civic participation and employment, communication, and community
support and health services. In 2010, the WHO launched the ‘Global Network of Age-
friendly Cities’ with 47 individual cities that included Melville (WA) and Melbourne
(Vic). Currently, in Australia, Boorondara (Vic), Canberra (ACT), Melville (WA),
Rockingham (WA), Unley (SA) and Warnambool (Vic) are listed as active members of
the network, which reflects both international trends and the popularity of the
approach to policy-makers. However, while ‘active ageing’ has been progressively
restricted to reflect a longer working life (Moulaert & Biggs, 2013), age-friendliness
has remained unclear as to which phase of later life is actually being addressed.
UNICEF’s child-friendly cities, established as part of the UN Conference on
Human Settlements (Habitat II) in 1996, have as its foundation the 1989 UN
Declaration on the Rights of the Child. As such, a ‘Child-Friendly City is committed to
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the fullest implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child’ (UNICEF,
2004). The notion of rights has proven a subject of debate, with disagreement on how
far children’s rights extend, or indeed for some, whether specific children’s rights are
valid at all (see for example Freeman, 2007). The development of children’s rights
from the 1950s to the present reflects some important, but subtle shifts with, since the
UNs first declaration on the rights of the child in 1959, a growing emphasis on children
as valued and capable participants (Tranter & Sharpe, 2007). UNICEF’s child-friendly
cities programme picks up on the development of positive rights and children’s
participation as ‘the very essence of the process of building a Child-Friendly City’
(UNICEF, 2004). What a rights-based agenda provides is a foundation that appears to
be lacking in relation to older adults (Fredvang & Biggs, 2012). Rights imply legislative
and legal commitments and a set of universal norms. From this basis, the child-friendly
cities programme has worked to enhance features of the built and natural environment
that can advance children’s rights, including parks and play spaces and children
services. As such, the children’s rights agenda remains strong, though it is hard to find
instances where the interests of children are not subsumed by wider economic and
political concerns.
Like WHO’s commitment to ‘active ageing’, UNICEF remains committed to the
view that the built environment is a foundation for creating user-friendly communities.
Child-Friendly Cities function to ensure that local governments and authorities
translated commitments made at the global, national and state levels into specific urban
environments (Riggio, 2002). In Australia, for example, children’s rights form an
important part of national childhood and child development policies. The Council of
Australian Government’s (COAG) National Childhood Development Strategy affirms a
commitment to children’s rights, but evidences a drift towards seeing children as
principally future workers, rather than as citizens and active participants in their own
right, as intended by Article 12 of the original Convention. Thus, COAG states:

Children are also important for their future contribution to society—as the next
generation of leaders, workers, parents, consumers and members of communities.
Their ability to participate fully in society as adults will be largely shaped by their
childhood experiences. Children who have a good start in life are more likely to
develop the capabilities that will better equip Australia to compete in a global
 102 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

society. This will be increasingly important as our workforce shrinks due to

population ageing and low fertility rates. (COAG, 2009, p. 7)

An investment in childhood development has long-term benefits for the individual,

society and the economy. A UNICEF’s CFC global network of cities and municipalities
pre-dates the age-friendly/active ageing initiative, and a rights-based approach, which
draws on commitments made by the government to the Convention on the Rights of
the Child, has arguably generated a wider support base.
If age-friendly communities have emerged through a policy focus on active ageing:
the creation of optimal environments that enhance participation then the child-friendly
cities programme is more firmly grounded in a rights-based approach. The issue of
comparison is not clear-cut; however, as both have been subject to the priorities of
other parts of the life course, most notably in relation to working life. Further, the
values attached to later life are less clear and the benefits that flow from increasing
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numbers of older adults are less well-defined, with much of the policy literature on
adult ageing becoming bogged down in justifying the economic potential of population
ageing. The age-friendly literature appears to present an ambitious promise: the
creation of optimal environments for older adults which also offer solutions to wider
social problems. But its specific focus, meaning and outcomes have yet to be fully
grounded, both conceptually and empirically (Buffel et al., 2012).

Risks and opportunities of urban environments

The dangers of urban living are often the most salient aspects affecting the ‘invisibility’
of children and older adults. Historically, the planning and development of modern
cities functioned largely to support productive capacities and overlooked the needs of
young and old (van Vliet, 2011).
For older, adults the risk of social isolation has emerged as a principal concern, as is
reflected in the WHO’s (2007) emphasis on the interconnection of systems and of civic
participation. Gleeson (2001) points to the fact that urban environments may present
physical and institutional barriers that can exacerbate social exclusion, isolating
particular social and age groups from mainstream society. Evidence suggesting that
urban environments and neighbourhoods work to exclude older adults is persuasive
(see for example Scharf et al., 2002; Scharlach & Lehning, 2013) and examples of
unsafe, insecure and unwelcoming urban setting for older adults have been
documented (Smith, 2009). Similar evidence highlights the dangers of urban living for
children, including unsafe surroundings, traffic congestion, poor transport and in some
areas lack of services and amenities (Bartlett, 2002). According to Bartlett (2002, p. 7)
what particularly worries children ‘is the extent to which they feel threatened by and
excluded from their urban surroundings.’ Scharlach and Lehning (2013) have proposed
the age-friendly city as one that fosters social inclusion, addressing the dangers of
economic vulnerability, disabling environments and ageist social norms. They look
towards measures that encourage social integration, social support and access to
resources amongst older adults to suggest ways in which vulnerabilities can be reduced.
Children’s vulnerabilities are at the centre of child-friendly initiatives. Like older
adults, they are deemed particularly sensitive to changes in their immediate
 THE PROMISE OF INTERGENERATIONAL SPACE 103

environment, and display the same connection to home and neighbourhood. The
children’s rights approach presupposes a more substantial critique of urban
environments. The rights agenda centres heavily on poverty and disadvantage, and
its prevalence amongst urban populations. With increasing urban growth children’s
rights becomes more important because as UNICEF’s (2010, p. 28) report card on
inequality amongst children states: ‘children are not to be held responsible for the
circumstances in which they are born.’ As a life stage, value of childhood is not
problematised to the same extent as old age. Their unmet rights presuppose structural
inequality, rather than a problem with the age group itself. However, it is a particular
characteristic of current urban development that both initiatives take issue with: an
unplanned, unmediated form of urban growth, that threatens to leave both children
and older adults behind, and in Brecht’s (cited in Davies, 2004) words, create countless
‘victims of the Metropolis’.
A strong connection to home is observed amongst children (see Ward, 1978;
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Christensen & O’Brien, 2002) and older adults rely heavily on their immediate
environment for assistance and support (Wahl & Oswald, 2010; Buffel et al., 2012).
These attachments to neighbourhood and place, access to a wide range of
intergenerational networks and the availability of social and cultural resources appear
to provide the most beneficial opportunities of urban living.

Towards intergenerational cities

On a wall adjacent to the Melbourne Cemetery, there are graffiti saying ‘work, buy,
consume, die’. Clearly someone intends to critique the current use of this, the most
commonly voted ‘world’s most liveable city’. By critically examining where different
formulations of urban use, age and generation intersect, it may be possible to both
develop an understanding of intergenerational relations in urban contexts, while at the
same time, discover the changing assumptions driving the City itself.
Our urban space is generationally configured, institutionally (Kohli, 1985) and in
terms of segregated geography (Laws, 1995) and the use of cities and their different
sections, changes over time in age determined ways. In the UK, for example, the role
of London’s suburbs is an example of space designed for families with young children,
which is now largely used by active older adults (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister,
2004). Melbourne has seen a series of reports that attempt to engage with the challenge
of demographic shifts including an ‘Inquiry into opportunities for participation of
Victorian seniors’ (Parliament of Victoria 2012). As population ageing and global
migration influence the use of urban space, these trends interact with the meanings
associated with childhood and old age and the meaning of friendliness.

Cities ‘for all ages’?

An intergenerationally interesting policy shift has been where the notion that age-
friendliness is seen as being inherently friendly for all. As Scharlach (2009) states, ‘an
ageing-friendly community promotes the physical and psychosocial well-being of
community members throughout the life cycle’ and is essentially a society for all ages.
 104 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

Indeed, the notion that ‘age-friendliness benefits all ages’ comprises one of the
arguments to support investment in urban modification, and in North America, a
number of organisations and government agencies have built a strong case on the
mutual benefits of age-friendly design. The focus is largely on the physical aspects of
urban design: sidewalks, parks and recreation facilities, transport services, with the
modelling for ‘community for all ages’ (Arizona State University, 2005; National
Association of Area Agencies on Aging, 2007; Miller & Annesley, 2011), with the idea
‘that by accommodating the needs of older people, it is possible to better accommodate
the needs of all groups’ (Miller & Annesley, 2011, p. 23). Similar developments have
taken place in the UK (Department for Work and Pensions, 2009) and Australia
(Commonwealth of Australia, 2006). As suggested by Van Vliet (2011), such
approaches may apply across generations, as ‘intergenerational integration of urban
livability initiatives will result in more efficient use of physical facilities and funding
sources’. The notion of a design for all ages has been closely associated with principles
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of universal design, which arising from inclusive design for disability also maintains
that: ‘Design for the young and you exclude the old; design for the old and you include
the young’ (Bernard Isaacs cited in Noyes, 2001)
Bernard Isaacs’ statement is often used both to promote universal design
principles and to shore up arguments for age-friendly communities. The WHO
supports this trend: ‘An age-friendly city emphasizes enablement rather than
disablement; it is friendly for all ages and not just “elder-friendly”’. (WHO, 2007,
p. 72). In a few cases, the statement has been reversed, for instance the International
Making Cities Liveable (IMCL) movement, based in the US, claims that ‘children,
whose needs if addressed, can help us reach exemplary livability for everyone’ (www.
livablecities.org/).
The Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing in 2002 stated: ‘A society for
all ages encompasses the goal of providing older persons with the opportunity to
continue contributing to society.’ In the UK, the government report ‘Building a society
for all ages’ focused on the older demographic and the challenges of population ageing.
The Australian Government, which claimed in 2005 to have been the first nation to
adopt the society for all ages approach to population ageing, launched a speakers series,
A Community for All Ages 2 Building the Future. Although short-lived, the aim was to
‘raise awareness of the need to plan and build better communities to meet the long-
terms needs of a future Australian population which will have a higher proportion of
older people’ (Commonwealth of Australia, 2006). It, however, made little mention of
other age groups, and its focus was primarily on issues of physical design, particularly
housing.
What appears to be taking shape is recognition of the principles shared between
age- and child-friendliness. Surprisingly, there has been little research on the
convergence of such principles (Carr et al., 2013). Carr et al. undertook a review of
municipal activity on both child- and age-friendliness in Australia and made
recommendations to the sponsoring local authority. It was found that while policy
initiatives had been undertaken, often in parallel to each other, there was, however,
little empirical evidence to demonstrate either the implementation of shared
generational strategies, or their positive effects.
A closer reading of a rhetorical shift towards environments for all ages may indicate
the use of the term as a trope, to advance the cause of design that takes specifically
 THE PROMISE OF INTERGENERATIONAL SPACE 105

older adults into account while hitching it to the wagon of a universal good. The group
of older persons targeted is also left vague and open to wide interpretation and, as a
tactic to address demographic change in a predominantly ageist society, this approach
may bear fruit. However, the growth in the WHO network and the enthusiasm with
which specifically ‘age friendliness’ has been taken up as a policy initiative, indicates a
parallel dynamic at work. It is precisely because ‘age friendliness’ offers ‘something to
do’ (or at least write) in the face of population ageing, that the movement has grown so
quickly amongst policy-makers. And as such it is unclear how far, and in which
direction, it has been threatened by what Biggs (2004) has identified as ‘the
colonisation of the goals, aims, priorities and agendas of one age group onto and into
the lives of other age groups’. The notion of environments ‘for all ages’ does not
currently appear to actively lead to alliances between other life course ‘peripheries’
such as children and is predominantly aimed at the generational centre of ‘adult
working life’. A shift in discourse from age to all ages runs the danger that it eclipses
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the specific needs of a particular age group and reinvents a ‘universal urbanite’.

Intergenerational cities: the preventive and the future

A drift towards ‘friendliness for all ages’ may then simply identify a form of
idealisation: one that runs the risk of ignoring specifically intergenerational interaction
and how it is affected by urban space and time. In this section, we examine how the
intergenerational has been interpreted in the discussion of urban design.
Both AFC and CFC represent what Sassen (2000) calls new claims on urban space.
There is a persuasive argument within both programmes that the needs of older adults
and children have traditionally been neglected in preference for production and
consumption dominating the ‘middle years’ of the life course (Smith, 2009; Woolcock
et al., 2010; van Vliet, 2011).
It appears that intergenerational discourse can be broken down into: the
preventative virtues of urban design for the future lived life course, benefits for future
generations, and intergenerational interaction in the here and now.
The notion of using urban design to prevent future illness and healthy ageing is
perhaps best seen in ‘Active Design’. The New York Active Design initiative points out
that ‘In the 19th and early 20th centuries, architects and urban reformers helped to
defeat infectious diseases like cholera and tuberculosis by designing better buildings,
streets, neighbourhoods, clean water systems and parks. In the 21st century, designers
can again play a crucial role in combating the most rapidly growing public health
epidemics of our time: obesity and its impact on related chronic diseases such as
diabetes, heart disease, and some cancers (City of New York, 2010).
The authors argue that physical activity and a healthy diet can be increased by
changing established architectural and urban design strategies. The redesign of
neighbourhoods, buildings, streets and urban spaces, so that they encourage walking,
bicycling and active transportation and recreation, has been a key element in
incorporating the principles of preventive public health into the urban environment.
Relatively simple changes, such as pedestrianised streets, protection against sun and
bad weather, making stairs and walking attractive options to elevators and cars will
promote active ageing and reduce the risk of chronic disease such as obesity.
 106 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

Future generations have also been identified in a second way, associated with the
environmental movement. Here, authors such as Wade-Benzoni and Tost (2009),
Bessant (2011) and Satterthwaite (1999) emphasise the effects of current decision-
making on generations that are as yet unborn. Duty to future generations entails an
urban landscape designed in ways that are more energy efficient and amenable to
recycling, that it has been by current generational groups. From an intergenerational
perspective, an exclusive concern for future generations runs the risk of both
conceiving power relations in generational rather than political –economic terms,
where current generations may experience little control over urban development.
It also tends to eclipse everyday intergenerational relations in the here and now. It is
perhaps instructive that the COAG Reform Council and McClintock (2012) review on
Australian cities focuses entirely on the needs of contemporary youth in the future
Australian City, whereas older Australians were perceived as being not part of the
brief. And while cities for youth and future cities are not the same, their conflation had
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eclipsed consideration of later life. As Bridge and Elias (2010) argue, designing and
building for an older population is about ‘future-proofing’ infrastructure and
resources. It is not simply designing for a youthful future.

Intergenerational cities: the material and emotional in the

here and now

If both the preventive and the ‘future generations’ approach tend to eclipse
intergenerational relations in the here and now, it is important to ask what the core
issues for contemporary generational relations might be. At least two answers emerge
from the literature. First concerns the material environment of contemporary cities,
and the second, the opportunities they give for generational empathy and
understanding. Buffel et al. (2012) propose that the material conditions of city life
may be a better starting point for understanding pressures on the lives of older people.
With this approach, the focus shifts from defining an ideal city for all ages to the
question of ‘What are the actual opportunities and constraints in cities for maintaining
quality of life as people age?’ Second, Biggs et al. (2012) suggest that generationally
intelligent spaces, ones that allow different generational groups to meet, interact and
include ways of negotiating the shared use of their environment would be a key
element in sustainable living. Here, the authors focus on the natural ambivalence that
arises as part of intergenerational interaction and the establishment of common goals
based on an emotional understanding of the life priorities of each age group. Both of
these approaches would shift the terms of the debate towards what might be called the
emotional-material rhythms of urban life. Such an approach would take into account
longitudinal impacts on urban life, which is applied to concrete interaction within the
contemporary urban environment.
Buffel et al. (2012) identify a ‘paradox of neighbourhood participation’, which can
apply to both children and older adults: ‘they tend to spend a lot of time in their
neighbourhood (being part of the city), but are often among the last to be engaged when
it comes to decision-making processes within their neighbourhood (taking part in the
city)’. If the right to appropriate urban space and the right to participate in the
production of urban space are central to the rights of the city (Purcell, 2003), then the
 THE PROMISE OF INTERGENERATIONAL SPACE 107

appropriation of urban space by older adults and children poses a number of challenges.
These include the ownership of urban space, the management of public space, the
prominence of private property, the age segregation of institutions and the difficulties
of establishing a protected place of one’s own. For children, the appropriation of space
is best viewed in terms of play. As Hart (2002) found in researching children’s play
spaces in New York, it is the appropriated play space, rather than the planned or
segregated playground, that children valued most. Hart also argues that children gain
more developmentally if given the freedom to discover and establish their own games
and play spaces. However, there is strong ideological current behind the segregation of
children’s play spaces, a point that corresponds with Lefebvre’s (1991 [1968]) notion
that urban space is constructed and organised ideologically. Lefebvre’s ‘right to the
city’ contains, according to Purcell (2003), a right of use and a right to make decisions
about the urban environment. As Lefebvre states (1996): ‘It would affirm, on the one
hand, the right of users to make known their ideas on the space and time of their
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activities in the urban area; it would also cover the right to the use of the centre, a
privileged space, instead of being dispersed and stuck into ghettos’. If use value is
advanced over exchange value, then urban environments can be reclaimed as places to
live in and explore, rather than as commodities for sale and resale, over which older
adults and children, in particular, have little control.
In the 1960s, Lefebvre and the Urban Situationist Guy Debord were both
interested in the everyday experience of the City, the latter even invited Lefebvre to
walk together to explore his ideas on ‘psychogeography’. Although Lefebvre tended to
emphasise the interaction of functions in city life—work, leisure, privacy and family
life—Debord became interested in the ways in which a pre-existing urban
environment could freeze the fluidity of social interaction. According to Ballve (2013),
Psychogeography emphasises playfulness and ‘drifting’ around urban environments and
was defined by Debord (1955) as ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of
the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and
behavior of individuals. It constituted ‘a whole toy box full of playful, inventive
strategies for exploring cities’. The opposite, what Debord called ‘the spectacle’,
forced people to perform pre-determined roles and pathologised civic interaction
around the needs of commerce and work discipline.
For the current discussion, Debord supplies an interesting connection between
the material opportunities that urban enviroments supply and the possibilities for
psychosocial empathy between generations, if, as Biggs (1999) has argued elsewhere,
age often becomes a performance, based on a socially restrictive and stereotyped
persona. The notion of play, as what you do when freed from the discipline of
work, and from being a spectacle to others and oneself, also gives meaning to the
peripheral. The ‘purposelessness’ of childhood and old age can be seen as play in this
sense, which appears to those without empathy as meaningless, rather than being a
form of creative drift, freed from the bonds of forced direction. Recognising ‘drift’
as meaningful activity beyond the constraints of work and production, significantly
enhances the possibilities for generationally constituted space and empathic
engagement between generational groups. Debord (1967) was particularly interested
in the “separation of work, of people, things determined by pre-existing material
spatial arrangements’. However, rather than attempting to unify these different
spheres, as was the tendency in Lefebvre, he emphasised moving beyond them, and
 108 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

as such may hold greater promise as a means of exploring the new challenges
presented by changing demographic relations. We need then to step beyond the
invisibility of older people and of children excepting as obstacles in the way of
working life, the shaping of children into the expected habits of the grown worker,
and the discarding of the old as a burden to the present. As generational groups that
largely stand outside the material empathic creation of urban space, they both tell
us how it works, and point to ways to make it more humane. Although material
design embodies the means, of fixing and freeing up social behaviour,
intergenerational empathy addresses the end: the development of an intergenera-
tional urban community.

Conclusions: beyond the working age city, towards the

generationally intelligent city
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So in moving towards a deeper understanding of intergenerational urban space, we

have suggested a re-emphasis on spaces that allow intergenerational ‘play’. Then, play
is as the emergence of creative spaces that can simultaneously contain the different
timelines and priorities of specific generational groups. However, this is play that is not
confined, either as Kuhn (1977) had called retirement communities as ‘playpens for the
old’, or as age-segregated areas that protect, but also exclude children from
exploration and interaction. Playgrounds are, as Hart (2002) points out, bounded and
protected but also restrictive. Those who voluntarily retreat into retirement
communities (rather than involuntarily entering the last resort of residential care)
similarly project a fear of urban life (Kastenbaum 1993). We are not arguing here for
the dissolution of private generational space. Both children and elders will need privacy
and protection from the public gaze as well as protection within it. Rather, we would
advocate a reorientation in public policy and urban design that promotes the specifically
intergenerational nature of human interaction and copes with peripheral populations
who are ‘not of working age’ by segregating them.
In terms of age- and child-friendly urban design, this would militate for a dropping
of both the rhetoric of age-specific and friendliness for ‘all ages’. Rather, we should
build intergenerational spaces that recognise their use in line with at least three aspects
of intergenerational relations. Biggs and Lowenstein (2011) argue that generational
intelligence, the ability to put oneself in the position of other age groups, relies on a
recognition of a distinctive self, of generational difference and the negotiation of
empathic generational relations. In terms of generational space, this suggests the
following. First, recognising that each generational group will have life projects, arising
from the point they have reached in their life course, which give rise to distinctive
requirements of urban space. Second, that intelligent generational spaces are both the
result of and should enhance the ability to negotiate the sustainable use of those spaces
in generational terms. The uses made of these spaces, by specific age groups separately
and through shared activity, should be able to stand the test of time and produce
mutually advantageous use value. Third, those environments should be designed so that
they enhance the cooperative and emotionally empathic capacity to share space. This
will include recognition of the need for generational privacy as well as of interaction
and solidarity. The aim of intergenerational urban space should be to enhance social and
 THE PROMISE OF INTERGENERATIONAL SPACE 109

emotional understanding between age groups, increase harmony and reduce

generational conflict.
The notion of play is important here for two reasons. First, it identifies the
flexibility necessary for effective intergenerational negotiation. Although all forms of
interaction include an element of masquerade, an age-based persona acts to both
protect and connect with other age groups (Biggs, 1999a). An ability to play with
identity would therefore be an important concomitant to intergenerationally
communicative space. Second, it returns the nominated peripheral parts of the life
course back to the centre and as such it critiques the fixing of urban spaces into sites of
production and consumption. We are, as Winnicott (1964), the great advocate of
intergenerational interaction as a means of adaptive development, suggests, offered
‘wiggle room’ to experiment with identity, with the material world and with each
other.
An intergenerational understanding of space implies that cities are more than
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simply rat-runs between centres of work, consumption and closed door domesticity.
They are also more than places for the active aged to relax and socialise with each
other, or a setting for healthy exercise regimes. While the complexity of urban life will
invest cities with all of these elements, we must also ask ‘What makes urban space
creative, public and delightful and what is the role of intergenerational living in all
this?’ In beginning to answer this question, we suggest the following: A functioning and
sustainable urban space entails taking shared and distinctive generational requirements
into account, negotiating diverse and possibly contradictory uses and designing
structures that can stand the test of generational time.

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Simon Biggs is Professor in Social Policy and Gerontology in the School of Social and
Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Address: School of Social & Political
Sciences, Melbourne University, Melbourne, Australia. [email: biggss@unimelb.edu.au].

Ashley Carr is a Research Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the
University of Melbourne, and a Research Officer at the Brotherhood of St Laurence,
Melbourne. Address: Research and Policy Centre, The Brotherhood of St Laurence,
Victoria, Australia.

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