No abstract

The World Health Organization’s age-friendly city initiative emerged as a response to the intersecting global trends of population ageing and urbanisation. However, a third global trend—digitalisation—has largely been overlooked in research and policy making relating to age-friendly cities and communities. Within the context of a general shift towards online civic participatory activities, this article explores older adults’ digital citizenship in an age-friendly city in the North of England. Drawing on interviews, observations and field notes from design workshops as part of an ongoing participatory action research project, we consider two key questions. First, how does an age-friendly city stakeholder organisation of older adults make use of digital technologies in order to provide digital information and communications? Second, what is the potential of digital audio to increase civic participation in later life and local engagement with age-friendly issues? Our analysis focuses on two domains of the World Health Organization’s age-friendly city framework: Communication and information and civic participation. First, we report on the stakeholder organisation’s efforts to re-design their digital newsletter in order to provide information and communications to older residents about local work on ageing projects. We then outline the organisation’s efforts, in a public setting, to engage with digital audio as a way to increase the participation of older residents with age-friendly topics. We conclude by suggesting the need to re-frame the role of digital technologies within the age-friendly city, broadening the scope from accessibility towards enhancing digital citizenship opportunities.

In increasingly digitalised societies, government initiatives to ensure that public services remain accessible for everyone typically focus on the digital inclusion of older adults. However, by solely viewing older adults as passive recipients or consumers of services, digital inclusion strategies under-emphasise the concept of digital participation. Highlighting the importance of older adults as active contributors in a digital society, we investigated the potential of content creation to increase older adults' digital skills whilst also strengthening their digital participation. Through a workshop and interviews involving three different groups of older content producers, we show that content creation can stimulate older adults' digital participation. We report on challenges faced by the content creators, including time constraints, lack of professional support and the preference to create content collaboratively. We propose that by facilitating collaborative content creation activities, local communities can better support older adults' digital participation and facilitate inclusion across different life domains.

The Later Life Audio and Radio Co-operative (LLARC) is an England-wide network of older content creators, age-inclusive radio stations, third sector organisations, local authorities and academics working on ageing issues. The co-operative was established in 2019 as an outcome from a participatory action research project. Aiming to promote talk-based content created by older adults, the LLARC advocates for greater representation of older adults in broadcasting. This paper considers radio production as an approach to support civic participation in later life. Firstly, we present findings from a two-day radio festival for older adults at which the LLARC was launched. Drawing on discussions at the radio festival, we highlight three themes that underpin the LLARC's mission: 1) challenging ageist stereotypes; 2) advocating for intergenerational cohesion; and 3) considering radio as a technology for community engagement. Secondly, based on observations, we report on the organisation's ongoing digital development and adaptation to remote digital production workflows in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We discuss the potential of radio as a technology to involve older adults in citizen dialogue. Due to its combination of digital and non-digital elements, we conclude that radio production can be an accessible technology for older adults to engage with in order to have their voices heard more widely. Our work contributes to key debates at the intersection of technology use and community engagement in later life, suggesting a central role for audio and radio as accessible routes to support public debates and promote citizen dialogue in later life.