Cities As Innovation Hubs Of Longevity Societies
UK National Innovation Center on Ageing’s first global City of Longevity Conference
The first City of Longevity Conference took place in Newcastle, UK this week. The city, tucked into England’s northeast, has long been a hub of medical advances. This conference aims to inaugurate a new slant on innovation: empowering cities to become proactive healthy ageing hubs. The idea is to graduate from a system organised around caring for the sick to becoming longevity ready – preventively prepared for the arrival of the second billion people 60+. Naturally inter-generational and increasingly home to the vast majority of the world’s population, cities are the perfect setting to normalise intelligent ageing across life’s ages and stages.
Nic Palmarini, Director, NICA
Central to the effort is the UK Innovation Centre on Ageing (NICA), led by Nic Palmarini and Lynne Corner. Their conference brought together mayors, urban planners, public and private sector players, and academics from cities across the world – to co-create the City of Longevity. Here’s a summary of what was discussed.
The Call and The Context
There are now five generations co-existing on the planet. But the balance between them is shifting – fast. From a short century ago when there were a small number of older people to many young ones, we are now in an era of generational balance, with the number of old becoming as numerous – sometimes more – than the young. The billion people currently over 60 in the world will double to over 2 billion by 2050. Most of them will live in cities.
Preparing for this second billion requires adapting at speed. How to accelerate both innovation and application? By designing tools and approaches that multiply and combine existing efforts and understanding. Adapting in real time to reality by constantly collecting and understanding data. Working with people as engaged citizens. And harnessing cities as full partners. That’s what the City of Longevity initiative hopes to do.
Why Focus on Cities?
Because that’s where most of us will live – and age, says the World Bank’s Lead Urban Specialist, Horacio Cristian Terraza. Fertility, mortality and migration are the three variables of population growth. And they are all moving us city-ward.
Horacio Cristian Terraza, The World Bank
In just a couple of decades, the rural/ urban divide will have flipped as much as the demographic one. Almost 7 billion people (of the projected global population of 10 billion) will live in cities, up from 4.4 billion today. Latin America is an early example of this shift, with rapid urbanisation making its population already 81% urban. The impact on cities – and the importance of their response in designing responses – is huge. “Most cities,” says Terraza, “have some ageing initiatives but no clear longevity strategy.”
Pam Smith, Newcastle’s Chief Executive, acknowledged that governments can legislate but they can’t make longevity-readiness real on the ground. Cities, she says, must be the catalysts for making change happen. Because cities are naturally inter-generational, mainstreaming the needs and interests of multiple generations into urban planning is “not about care homes – it’s about conversations over coffee and cocktails.”
New Map of Life Meets the City of Longevity
The conference was part of a broader partnership between NICA and the Stanford Center on Longevity. It aims to lead ageing innovation by building on two related concepts, Stanford’s New Map of Life and NICA’s City of Longevity framework.
Ageing doesn’t begin when we get old. It starts in the womb and continues to our tombs. The conference called for a transition from a focus on reactive, ‘ageing societies’ to more prepared, ‘longevity cities’, designed with an integrative approach to the whole of life. This requires shifting the perceptions and norms of entire sectors – from health care and housing to transportation. Not to mention the behaviour of millions. With cities as the laboratory for both research and implementation.
Cities are already on the move, but often in a disparate array of disconnected initiatives. From Lisbon and Bergamo to Buenos Aires and Belfast, cities are experimenting and responding to the new longevity. Buenos Aires is actively nudging its 15 million-strong population from care to prevention with a program of self-responsibility. Each citizen is assigned to a primary care team and connected to it through a simple app. Tel Aviv is mobilising its municipal services by putting capabilities into trucks that bring central services home to people. Barcelona, strapped for space, is launching its Superblocks initiative, to change the priorities of public spaces. The city wants to put citizens – rather than cars – at the centre of its streets. Cities are brimming with energy around the subject, it was palpable in Newcastle. Now how to build the elements into a more shared, intelligent, data-driven approach?
The Rise of the ‘Ilities’ – Activity, mobility, walkability
The “magic pill” of longevity is to keep people moving – with contexts that facilitate this. Not necessarily with more friendly cities, but more active ones. People don’t stop moving because they age, they age because they stop moving. Transportation, housing and diets need to be updated to nudge people back towards greener, less polluted, more walkable city centres – after a pandemic that saw many people run from that model. Densification will be the mantra of the longevity city – mutualising services and maximising their use. If people are going to be working longer through their 60s and 70s, accessibility and transportation will become essential.
One of today’s design challenges is the silos in which many metropolitan services operate, like health care, housing or transportation. They don’t design longevity strategies together, yet all are implicated and essential. Mainstreaming longevity across multi-stakeholder groups is today’s urgent invitation.
There are clear overlaps between climate and longevity strategies. These also impact tourism, the life blood of many cities’ financial viability. Creating greener cities makes them safer and healthier for all ages. It also makes them more attractive travel destinations. Many cities are clearly seeing the business opportunity of the ‘silver dollar,’ and the preponderance of older travellers in urban tourism. Tourism has changed, with people wanting more authentic experiences and families booking more inter-generational trips. Distinctive places – and photographable cities – deliver this.
Connecting the Dots – and the Data
To avoid so many cities innovating in isolation, NICA is launching an online AI-driven toolkit to try to connect the components of change. With a chemistry-inspired model, it invites cities to build their longevity strategies from elements of a database of existing initiatives. And publish their approaches, results and data, creating a reference library of ideas for cities everywhere. It will be open source, permanently evolving, and freely accessible to policy makers and citizens.
Yochai Shavit, of the Stanford Center on Longevity is dreaming of all the data that cities could collect to help in supporting healthy ageing. From health measures like walkability scores and healthcare accessibility to air quality and road congestion. Mental health measures like the percentage of green spaces to stress levels. Or measures of belonging and inter-generational mixing. The push to quantify – and then monitor – the multiple components of healthy ageing in urban environments is on.
Getting Humans On Board
Healthy ageing depends as much on individual behaviours as it does on city strategies. So how to get people to move, sleep, eat real food and de-stress in a world encouraging them to do the contrary? Guendalina Graffigna, from the Universita
Prof. Guendalina Graffigna, Universita Cattolica Milan
Cattolica of Milan, a self-described “psychologist of un-behaviours,” is specialised in analysing what humans want to do but generally don’t. She prescribes moving marketing approaches into mainstream health care where “engagement becomes the motor from intention to action.”
That’s what Lynne Corner, Director of VOICE (and COO of NICA) is busy doing. Creating networks of engaged citizens across the globe in what she calls “the world’s largest listening lab.” Nurturing a growing international community of ‘innovation-savvy citizens’ in a global dialogue and debate across generations.
With this mass ‘listening’ project, VOICE seeks to understand the needs of all ages and underpin NICA’s work with real-world data and feedback loops. “It’s crucial for cities, investors and businesses,” she stresses, “for everything from street lighting to new models of payment.” VOICE brings people together to share experiences, reduce loneliness, and harness intelligence. They want cities to connect the dots and collect the data.
Lynne Corner, Director of VOICE, COO NICA
In the UK, says Corner, some 40% of the NHS budget is spent on preventable conditions. Investing earlier in data-driven, nudging behaviours, with cities nurturing responses and citizens knowing what to do, is where VOICE is focused. “Incremental changes in every part, where we could leverage existing systems and minimise duplication, would allow us to better use what we have. And share the learning with citizens. Because our most abundant resource is people.”
The City of Longevity concept offers a dynamic, evidence-based, open-source framework, complete with associated toolkit coming online soon. It is designed to help cities deliver practical actions enabling both residents and tourists live longer, healthier lives. Collaborating across multiple stakeholders but united by a single geographical place, longevity cities will be the theatre of our success in welcoming the second billion. With the city as partner, the people as proof and the data as an ongoing measure of success.