Introduction

This chapter explores what it means to use a ‘capability’ approach to designing an age-friendly city and its potential for developing physical and social environments that respond directly to the lived experiences of older people. Drawing on an interdisciplinary collaborative research/ design project that has informed the development of Manchester's age-friendly cities and communities (AFCC) programme, it describes a community-engaged, urban design research project conducted in the Old Moat area of the city in 2012. The project's aim was to explore the applicability of AFCC design guidance within a specific urban neighbourhood. The chapter focuses on the dynamic relationship between the research and design elements of the project. It examines how the process of discovering and sharing information about the lived experience of older people translates into the development and implementation of age-friendly activities and interventions intended to make a neighbourhood more appropriate to the needs and desires of its older residents.

Capability, design and active ageing

In urban studies, ‘capability’ models offer new ways of understanding and engaging with the relationship between cities and the individuals and groups within them (Nussbaum, 2011). They focus on the abilities of individuals to influence the wider world around them rather than identifying or representing ‘users’ of the city according to general categories such as disability, race, gender or age. Capability models are at the root of critiques regarding normative, ‘universal’ or ‘inclusive’ design approaches to disability and age (Boys, 2016). Such models are central to current conceptions of cities and citizenship in urban studies (Robinson, 2011) and architecture (Rawes, 2013). Moreover, they offer, as this chapter argues, a valuable way of rethinking approaches to age-friendly design. A capability perspective does not consider ‘the city’ either generally or abstractly ‘age-friendly’. Instead, it argues that specific groups of older people in the particular places that they live must not only actually experience a city to be age-friendly but must be actively instrumental in making this the case.

In this way, a positive, ‘capability’ reading of age-friendliness (the distinctive and central feature of the research/design project discussed in this chapter) places the World Health Organization (WHO) concept of ‘active ageing’ at the centre of the relationship between research and design activity, the local community and its older residents (see Chapter Two).