Taken in conjunction with the evidence from HelpAge’s survey of elders affected by climate change who would rather stay in risky rural areas than move to a city, we have a compelling argument that the most politically astute decision any city can make is to invest in strategies that make its city more attractive and livable for every member of society — cities that honor their social contract.

Fulfilling a city’s social contract does not rely upon moral obligation, but rather upon self-interest. The majority of global wealth is held in the private business sector. While more and more corporations are reevaluating their responsibility to society, it is ultimately local, regional and national government that is responsible for both the physical and social infrastructure of our cities — and by extension, for the natural resources upon which both rely.

Government can engage in meaningful conversation with the private sector if it asks, “What is in the interests of the private sector to help society become more successful?” Then, rather than moral obligation, the question becomes one of degree. Is the private sector keeping too much of the wealth from the use of natural resources for which it paid nothing? Does the health burden of contaminated resources outweigh the cost of responsible resource management? What are the financial consequences to business operations of resource depletion or unpredictable availability? What is the impact of civil unrest on business security? Are we investing enough in educating individuals to develop the technical and entrepreneurial capacity necessary for the private sector to be successful into the future? What is the risk of failing to transfer the depth of knowledge held in our elder population to younger generations? What is the impact to business efficiency when employees cannot easily get to their places of work?

We don’t need a revolution. We need a different perspective. If we can reconnect with the understanding that both our health and our wealth are inextricably dependent upon our physical environment, we can improve the way our cities serve their citizens.

Our elders still remember a time when we were not so divorced from our physical environment. I am quite convinced that engaging our elders in a conversation on the complex, vexing issues of unpredictable weather, unreliable water sources, food scarcity, restricted mobility and civil security would yield critical insights into more responsible paths forward.

Our elders are the canaries in the mine. If we can find ways to support healthy, active, engaged aging in our cities, we will have ensured that every citizen has the opportunity for a successful future.

Gary Lawrence is vice president and chief sustainability officer at ArchTam.
Twitter: @CSO_ArchTam

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The reality of going to most conferences is that you listen for 80 percent of the time to things that you are already aware of (which might be interesting, but aren’t necessarily teaching you anything), 10 percent of the time feeling really bored and/or irritated by someone who just has it wrong, and the remaining 10 percent of the time feeling properly inspired and excited.

And so it might have been at the 7th International Urban Design Conference earlier this month in Adelaide. Something that felt different during these two days of talks, however, was a confluence of both new material and consistent themes. This gave me a stronger sense of progress (or at least the recognised need for change) than I’ve felt in the urban planning/design arena in Australia over at least the last few years.

It’s not that the material was always mind-bogglingly new or innovative. It was more that the thematic consistency – supported by some genuinely engaging use of real data and hard facts – gave a strong impression of something that can’t be ignored forever.

So what were these engaging themes, looming challenges and progressive ideas? Here are a few.

Our health as humans is being more defined and influenced by urban planning and design than by the health system. As we pour inordinate quantities of money into hospitals, cures, treatments and drugs, we completely ignore this fact. Scary, yes, but also exciting in that we have at hand a largely untouched set of opportunities to improve health through environmental design. We just have to enact them.

We keep planning for the past, and it’s doing us no favours. Humans have an awful trait that pervades almost everything we do – when seeking to understand what the future holds, we tend to look at the immediate past and then extrapolate it out. So if house prices have risen rapidly for the last ten years, we assume they will continue to rise rapidly for the next ten. If cars have been the dominant mode of transport for the last 30 years, we assume they will remain so for the next 30. One speaker described our assumption that net migration would continue to grow rapidly in the future as deeply flawed. If jobs in the resources sector evaporate further, and university education costs a lot more, the motivators for migration to Australia are likely to shrink dramatically. The tendency to look backwards for insights into the future is remarkably dumb, but we do it all the time. There is hope, however; smart people can do increasingly amazing things with data to understand more accurately what is likely to happen in the future. Given we can also define the future by our actions now, leadership and long-term thinking can go a long way.

Our aging population means more than the need for more nursing homes. It’s also going to leave our workforce severely depleted. An extraordinary proportion of our workforce is 40 years or older, and isn’t being replaced fast enough. This will have impacts across the economy, and not least in how we manage and develop our urban environment. We spend a disproportionate amount of time worrying about where to house ‘young families’, but the real challenge may come in where the growing population of empty nesters, single older people and the elderly will live.

The funding for the infrastructure we need won’t all come from the same sources it has in the past (government). The capacity and commitment of both federal and state government to fund key infrastructure items, particularly those that don’t make for a high-profile ‘announceable’, is diminished. But the need for critical infrastructure to support the ongoing evolution and progress of our cities is not. As ArchTam’s Joe Langley presented, there are mechanisms that allow the tangible private sector value created by new public infrastructure (such as higher land values) to be captured and used to fund that infrastructure.

So while the above points paint a picture of drastic changes, ‘wicked problems’ and generational shifts, the conference also highlighted some pretty exciting evolutions in practice. From genuine community-led planning (yes, consultation that actually influences outcomes!), sustainability and health planning working in partnership, planning practice that allows discretion to produce values-driven outcomes rather than checklist planning, and demographers actually being listened to, there’s a lot of good stuff going on.

The location of the conference in Adelaide, too, is a good sign. Adelaide has continued to blossom despite some long-held prejudices and misconceptions. The CBD has a spring in its step – new cafes, shops, bars and restaurants are supported by strategic public realm interventions. The Adelaide Oval redevelopment has injected new life north of the city and the award-winning South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute building on North Terrace promises to be the lynchpin of a newly enlivened health and knowledge precinct.

The 80-10-10 rule of conferences might continue to be the norm, but the 7th International Urban Design Conference in Adelaide demonstrated that there’s a lot to be excited about in urban design and the built environment in general. But ideas are one thing – putting them into practice to make every project as good as it can be is real the challenge that we all need to get to work on.

Peter Steele is a senior consultant, sustainability and climate change, based in ArchTam’s Melbourne office, and presented ‘Precinct Planning for Sustainability: The Armstrong Creek Experience’ at this month’s International Urban Design Conference.

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In my mind, these are not separate issues. Cities and nations are only vulnerable because they are full of people. Among those people, one of the most vulnerable and increasingly large groups is the elderly.

By 2050, approximately two billion people on the planet will be over the age of 65 — over one fifth of the global population.

Cities are often a source of great anxiety for elders. Cities are expensive. Access and mobility are challenging. Elders often find themselves dependent upon family members or isolated and alone. A 2009 HelpAge report on elders’ attitudes to climate change revealed that almost all older people surveyed would rather stay in environmentally risky rural areas than migrate to a city. They fear becoming a burden to their families, losing the connection to their community, and being unable to work and contribute. All these factors are known to compromise health and well-being.

“New York City’s food and medicine supplies are all warehoused in New Jersey. If Superstorm Sandy had closed down all of the tunnels instead of just one, over eight million people would have run out of essential food and medical supplies before the tunnels could have been cleared.”

Around the world, there are an increasing number of high-value fixes being proposed for the problems of climate change. Inevitably, the focus is on physical resilience in cities, massive engineering projects, expensive retrofits and additional infrastructure. Less often do we recognize the critical importance of building social resilience in cities — probably because there is no obvious engineering solution. Too often, social issues are simply discussed in terms of higher costs — higher health care costs for aging people living longer, the pension fund deficit, the shortage of affordable housing, etc.

In almost every case, any proposed solution meets strong public resistance. This is because investment in one area of concern comes inevitably at the expense of another. The world’s most developed societies are failing to respond to the warnings. The choice to act is a political one — and cities are forgetting their social contract.

One of the greatest challenges we face in making our cities more resilient and more sustainable is that we too often overlook the most critical system: the human system. We are a very self-interested species, yet, as times of crisis show all too clearly, we are only as strong as the most vulnerable among us. If we are to promote better outcomes for all of human society over time, it is critical that we find ways to reestablish the balance between human needs and desires and the natural systems that support life. Our economic and social systems cannot flourish if our physical world overwhelms us.

Building resilience into our cities means finding ways to fail more gently and sustain ourselves in times of need.

Gary Lawrence is vice president and chief sustainability officer at ArchTam.
Twitter: @CSO_ArchTam

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There is more access to care and better care now than ever before. Therefore, we will be living longer and healthier lives. We are going to need more available facilities and different kinds of facilities to deliver this care — more ambulatory and rehabilitation-based centers, more clinics in the community, more retirement villages that facilitate aging in place and more facilities that address the rise of medical tourism.

The current aging population is quite a different consumer of care than their parents were.  We are more informed on the availability of care and more information is available — literally, at our fingertips on our smartphones. Access to our caregivers is also possible through technology and this is a trend that is only growing as more technology is developed to make access to care more efficient and seamless. There is complementary medicine and alternative therapies.  We are already living longer and with complex comorbidities. This means that you may possibly be a cancer patient or survivor with a continued care program or maintenance and observation, and you may also be having rehabilitation for a hip or knee replacement. You may need to access various types of care in a single day.

An integrated care model ensuring seamless and efficient delivery of health care services is a key concept when planning for new facilities. ArchTam and DP Architects are working together to plan the new Sengkang General and Community Hospitals to achieve exactly that, integrated and comprehensive care. Serving the residents of the northeast, it is an acute hospital with a community hospital and specialist outpatient clinics. A new campus of continuous care, ready to meet the demands of the aging population, it is designed to meet the Building and Construction Authority’s Universal Design guidelines with a focus on age-friendly design features both inside and out.

We carefully thought through the patient journey through each phase of our design and planning work to be ready to evolve the design as we learn more about the demographic as it evolves. A great example of this is that we not only considered current access for wheelchairs and mobility devices, which are in high use today, but we are also studying future implications to today’s design when more and more people will access the facility in motorized devices. We want to address these factors in advance and have a plan in place to let the facility age in place as well.

Kerry Clifford (Kerry.Clifford@archtam.com) is vice president, health care, design and planning, at ArchTam for South and Southeast Asia. She understands the complex organizational issues facing large-scale health care institutions and has extensive experience designing facilities that answer patient and staff needs. Her work has been highlighted in Healthcare Design Magazine, World Health Design journal, Hospitality Design magazine and Going Places Singapore blog.

Twitter: @Kerryclifford
LinkedIn: Kerry Clifford

The post Aging in Place: Designing health care for Singapore’s Pioneer Generation appeared first on Blog.

Useful lessons can be learnt from around the world in meeting the needs of an ageing society. High quality, innovative designs are crucial to improving perceptions and delivery, meeting tenure needs, and suiting the diversity of society. Space, light, accessibility and a shared sense of purpose — the idea of being part of a community and of ordinary people taking control of housing processes — are recurring themes.

Many of the large residential care home providers such as Care UK have recognized the need to grow their operations to respond to the increase in demand. As a result, Care UK engaged ArchTam in 2010 to oversee a major program to build a substantial number of homes around the United Kingdom over five years. This is an ambitious goal, but as a delivery partner, we are taking a strategic approach to cost, project, risk and procurement management and helping them deliver the homes in the most cost-effective and efficient way.

Our success is evidenced through our work in partnership with a wide range of Clients and Designers, procuring mixed care and extra care schemes, which have been shortlisted and have won numerous national awards including Best Dementia Design at the National Care Awards and Best International Elderly Care Design at the International Academy for Design and Health.

ArchTam’s knowledge and experience with this type of facility puts us in an excellent position to advise on economic design and layout alternatives.

Our sector focus and geographical coverage enables us to produce unrivalled cost, functional and programme data through Global Unite, which contains historic project cost and other details available to all ArchTam staff globally.

For example, we have utilized this knowledge to:

• Provide a robust basis for negotiation and analysis of contractor costs, which resulted in significantly reduced elemental tender prices for work packages on a project procured at the peak of the market. This equated to total reduced tender costs of approximately 23% against the original tender.
• Challenge design and functional areas to ensure best practice and efficiencies were being achieved as the design developed, during pre-planning, and while working alongside the architect. This enabled reductions in the communal areas without any detriment to the overall design, reducing GIFA by 8%.

Paul Donlan (Paul.Donlan@archtam.com) is a director in ArchTam’s program, cost, consultancy business line and head of affordable housing, Europe. He has worked in the social housing and care/extra-care sector for nearly 40 years.
LinkedIn: Paul Donlan

The post Planning for aging populations appeared first on Blog.

Policy makers are experimenting with extending retirement ages and retraining elderlies, as well as encouraging less age discrimination at work.  With longer employment periods, the knowledge and experience held by older workers can be retained and applied. Physically and physiologically, the elderly today are in better shape than their forbears and, with decent amounts of disposable income at their fingertips, can keep active by engaging in more leisure and travel activities.

The psychological challenges to this population, however, are more onerous.  Research has shown that lack of mental stimulation readily leads to degeneration of the mind followed rapidly by physical deterioration. Furthermore, with advanced ageing comes the possibility of dementia and frailty. Dementia is a sad manifestation of brain degeneration and is best attended to through family support, but with less adult children and dislocated family units, this proves to be a difficult task. Governments can help by, in a reversal of roles, making children responsible for their parents followed by subsidies to build intergenerational communities.  Dealing with the onset of frailty on the other hand has to be addressed by the individual sufferer by opting to remain independent and self-reliant.  There are tools and technologies to assist this. For example, there is a growing market for devices which can track and monitor elderly people and emerging innovations such as smart clothes with built-in sensors, which will be able to measure bodily functions and alert wearers when medication or human repair is needed.  With the advancement in biomaterials, better and cheaper options are possible for implants to replace worn out parts such as teeth and bones or even organs in the future. In addition, as there are likely to be more long-lived females than males, these technologies can be gender-specific.

Relocating to elderly homes is a convenient resort for all except the ones being moved.  Ageing in place as an alternative requires reconfiguration of living conditions and lifestyles, so homes should age as gracefully as their occupants. This means adjustments such as less stairs, accessible toilets and avoiding potential risks such as slippery bathroom floors and sharp edges in rooms. There are a number of elegant solutions such as voice activated lights, padded flooring and walls, motion sensors to detect if someone has fallen over and specially adapted touch pads for arthritic fingers.

In the end, the challenge is affordability.  Government can encourage more savings and pension schemes to provide financial security for the elderly in the future. The private sector stands to also gain through providing homes, infrastructure, leisure services and health care. An integrated approach is called for involving private investments channeled by shrewd and forward-looking government policies and measures. The future is silver.

Dr. Thomas S.K. Tang (sk.tang@archtam.com) is corporate sustainability director of ArchTam in Asia. He manages a number of projects for public- and private-sector clients, and promotes and develops the company’s position and role as a sustainability leader in the region.
LinkedIn: Thomas Tang

The post The effects of a silver future appeared first on Blog.

Global demographics are shifting dramatically – we know that a growing majority of people now live in cities, but did you know that “by 2050 the world will have almost 400 million people aged 80 years or older”? This is according to John Beard, director of the Department of Ageing and Life Course at the World Health Organization (WHO), Geneva, Switzerland. “Never before have the majority of middle-aged adults had living parents,” points out Beard. “By 2050, 80 percent of older people will live in low- and middle-income countries.”

Challenges: age-proofing our cities to make them physically safer and more inclusive for older people, and changing our societal attitudes to work against ageism. Opportunities: increasingly, older people can contribute to society for extra years or decades. They can share with us the wisdom and experience that comes only with time.

Learn more about this and watch a video from WHO in an article from ArchTam’s e-magazine.

Jake Herson (jacob.herson@archtam.com) is managing editor of the Connected Cities blog.

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