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This chapter explores the role of age-friendly environments in supporting healthy ageing. Environments are important determinants of the trajectories of intrinsic capacity and functional ability over a person’s life course and into older age. Several domains of functional ability are particularly important in later life. We explore the importance of environments in enhancing three domains of functional ability: the ability to meet basic needs, to be mobile, and to build and maintain relationships. The chapter concludes with implications of an environmental approach to Healthy Ageing for geriatric medicine. These are new perspectives on holistic views of older persons in their environment, on making health services more age-friendly and on working collaboratively to achieve better outcomes.

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action problems, and can often proceed silently and inconspicuously -'simply by encouraging or tolerating selfinterested subversion of collective institutions from below' (Streeck and Thelen, p. 33). It is this 'more than historically contingent' (Streeck and Thelen, p. 33) association of 'function' and 'form', the liaison dangereuse of liberalization and incrementalism, that calls for entrepreneurial actors in the social sciences. We are badly in need of innovative and creative researchers who can swim against the tide of the neoinstitutionalist mainstream and are equipped with the theoretical sensibility and the methodological devices for discovering subcutaneous but substantial change. Crouch, Streeck, and Thelen show them the way.