Designing Age-Friendly Smart Cities: Challenges and Innovations in Australia, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States with Reference to Japan and Scandinavia
Globally, the structure of urban societies is reshaping due to the demographic transitions, with around 22% of the world’s population becoming senior citizens by 2050 (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs). This transformation signifies certain unprecedented challenges related to the community’s design and sustainable living among the existing and emerging cities. Despite having many international frameworks, there are significant gaps persisting in shaping the senior citizens inclusive smart city development. This study explores and understands the challenges and the need for developing the age-friendly smart cities across the USA, the UK, Australia, and India, while studying the efforts in Japan and Scandinavia as the benchmarks. Adapting a comparative, cross-national and combined methods design of study, distinct factors like the policies, subject matter expert views, the responses from the senior citizens (n = 380), to understand the gaps and development of the Age-Friendly Smart City Framework (AFSCF). This framework is about integrating key domain aspects like the infrastructure, mobility, digital health, digital inclusion, social participation, and governance models as policy alignment. Findings from the study signify convergences in identifying the aging as a policy priority and towards divergences shaped by the governance models, and resource availability. The study concludes that age-friendly smart city development is imperative for the economic and social sustainability of the new age cities.
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