The Role of Urban Environments in Promoting Active and Healthy Aging: A Systematic Scoping Review of Citizen Science Approaches

Abstract

Promoting active and healthy aging in urban spaces requires environments with diverse, age-friendly characteristics. This scoping review investigated the associations between urban characteristics and active and healthy aging as identified by citizen science (CS) and other participatory approaches. Using a systematic scoping review procedure, 23 articles employing a CS or participatory approach (participant age range: 54–98 years) were reviewed. An inductive and deductive thematic analysis was completed to (a) identify local urban barriers and facilitators and (b) map them against the World Health Organization (WHO) Checklist of Essential Features of Age-Friendly Cities. A new Citizen Science Appraisal Tool (CSAT) was developed to evaluate the quality of CS and other participatory approaches included in the reviewed articles. A range of interconnected urban barriers and facilitators was generated by residents across the personal (e.g. perceived safety), environmental (e.g. unmaintained infrastructure), socio-cultural (e.g. cross-cultural activities), economic (e.g. affordable housing) and political (e.g. governmental support to migrant communities) domains. Mapping the barriers and facilitators to the WHO age-friendly checklist underscored the checklist’s relevance and elucidated the need to explore barriers for migrant and cross-cultural communities and neighborhood development and alterations. The CSAT demonstrated strengths related to active engagement of residents and study outcomes leading to real-world implications. To advance the potential of CS to enrich our understanding of age-friendly environments, employing co-production to enhance relevance and sustainability of outcomes is an important strategy. Overall, employing CS highlighted the value of systematically capturing the experiences of older adults within studies aimed at promoting active and healthy aging.

Research on the Weighting Values of Community Aging-Friendly Construction Indexes With Different Expert Groups

“…Thus, it is clear that the community environment is the primary place for daily leisure, communication, interaction, and exercise activities of older adults, and that the community’s physical environment is one of the most critical factors influencing older adults’ activities and prosperous aging in place. 38 , 39 Notably, the “daily life” project’s weightage is not high among the 3, indicating that the concept of emphasizing daily older-adult care service in community home-based older-adult care has not been paid attention to. 40 It is urgent to further promote the concept of older-adult daily care service and develop an appropriate supply model.…”

The impact of residential environment on older people‘s capabilities to live independently: Evidence from Beijing

“…More importantly, the capability approach emphasizes that the extent of freedom of older adults to live the life they value re ects a person's access to resources. In the literature, there is a recognition that beyond the home, features of the neighborhood environment can support older adults (Stephens et al, 2019;Wood et al, 2022). However, speci c ways that environmental factors affect older adults' capabilities are unclear.…”

Active and healthy ageing in urban environments: laying the groundwork for solution-building through citizen science

“…Yet developing and actualizing inclusive and supportive age-friendly environments is argued to present a key gap for governance and public policy ( Buffel and Phillipson, 2016 ; Murtagh et al , 2021 ). Studies engaging older residents to identify urban influences of active and healthy ageing highlighted that engagement of residents during preliminary design and planning stages was missing ( James and Buffel, 2022 ; Wood et al , 2022 ). This strongly suggests a missed opportunity to take a place-based and community-engaged approach to addressing the health inequalities experienced between different age groups, such as differences in physical mobility attributed to age-related impairments and physical limitations ( Rosso et al , 2011 ; Bowering, 2019 ).…”