White, S., Hammond, M., 2018.

From representation to active ageing in a Manchester neighbourhood: Designing the age-friendly city

With a foreword by John Beard, Director of the Ageing Programme at the World Health Organisation, this collection is based on contributions from members of the INPAU network of leading research and policy groups from across Europe, Asia and North America. It provides complementary expertise in studying communities subject to both rapid urban change as well as economic and social deprivation. It enables analysis of contrasting experiences in relation to urban centres involved in developing age-friendly approaches. The chapters combine perspectives from urban sociology, environmental and ecological approaches in the field of gerontology alongside specific perspectives from architecture and urban design to which I make a central contribution. Although the issues raised by the 'age-friendly city' movement are beginning to be acknowledged at the level of social policy, awareness within relevant academic disciplines is still limited and this collection will help develop critical and interdisciplinary approaches in understanding both the challenges and problems arising through the ageing of urban populations. The volume is especially timely in the context of the WHO Global Report on Health (2015) and the European Guidance on Age-Friendly Environments (EU, 2015).
My chapter evaluates community-engaged design-research practices undertaken by the author in Manchester developing innovative approaches to researching and implementing the World Health Organisation Age Friendly City and Communities objectives through developing interdisciplinary community-engaged design-research practices for spatial inclusion in architecture and urban design. Using a Deleuzian conceptual framework, the research explores the applicability of the WHO approach to specific city neighbourhoods with particular regard to the relationship between processes of knowledge acquisition and dissemination ('research') and the development of concrete propositional activity ('design').