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Creating age-friendly communities: Housing and technology [book]

The “Creating Age-friendly Communities: Housing and Technology” publication presents contemporary, innovative, and insightful narratives, debates, and frameworks based on an international collection of papers from scholars spanning the fields of gerontology, social sciences, architecture, computer science, and gerontechnology. This extensive collection of papers aims to move the narrative and debates forward in this interdisciplinary field of age-friendly cities and communities. (This book is a reprint of the Special Issue Creating Age-friendly Communities: Housing and Technology that was published in Healthcare)

Communities at a Crossroads

How to conceptualize online sociability in the 21st century? To answer this question, Communities at a Crossroads looks back at the mid-2000s. With the burst of the creative-entrepreneur alliance, the territorialisation of the internet and the commercialization of interpersonal ties, that period constituted a turning point for digital communitarian cultures. Many of the techno-libertarian culture’s utopias underpinning the ideas for online sociability faced systematic counter evidence. This change in paradigm has still consequences today.Avoiding both empty invocations of community and swift conclusions of doom, Annalisa Pelizza investigates the theories of actions that have underpinned the development of techno-social digital assemblages after the ‘golden age’ of online communities. Communities at a Crossroads draws upon the analysis of Ars Electronica’s Digital Communities archive, which is the largest of its kind worldwide, and in doing so presents a multi-faceted picture of internet sociability between the two centuries.Privileging an anti-essentialist, performative approach over sociological understandings of online communities, Communities at a Crossroads proposes a radical epistemological turn. It argues that in order to conceptualize contemporary online sociability, we need first to abandon the techno-libertarian communalist rhetoric. Then, it is necessary to move beyond the foundational distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and adopt a material semiotic approach. In the end, we might have to relinquish the effort to define online or digital communities and engage in more meaningful mapping exercises.

Community engagement in deprived neighbourhoods during the COVID-19 crisis

The current COVID-19 pandemic confines people to their homes, disrupting the fragile social fabric of deprived neighbourhoods and citizen’s participation options. In deprived neighbourhoods, community engagement is central in building community resilience, an important resource for health and a prerequisite for effective health promotion programmes. It provides access to vulnerable groups and helps understand experiences, assets, needs and problems of citizens. Most importantly, community activities, including social support, primary care or improving urban space, enhance health through empowerment, strengthened social networks, mutual respect and providing a sense of purpose and meaning. In the context of inequalities associated with COVID-19, these aspects are crucial for citizens of deprived neighbourhoods who often feel their needs and priorities are ignored. In this perspectives paper, illustrated by a varied overview of community actions in the UK and The Netherlands, we demonstrate how citizens, communities and organizations may build resilience and community power. Based on in-depth discussion among the authors we distilled six features of community actions: increase in mutual aid and neighbourhood ties, the central role of community-based organizations (CBOs), changing patterns of volunteering, use of digital media and health promotion opportunities. We argue that in order to enable and sustain resilient and confident, ‘disaster-proof’, communities, areas which merit investment include supporting active citizens, new (digital) ways of community engagement, transforming formal organizations, alignment with the (local) context and applying knowledge in the field of health promotion in new ways, focussing on learning and co-creation with citizen initiatives.

Public Spaces and Urban Resilience: state of affairs in Dutch cities and exploring human and non-human perspectives

This collection of articles contains contributions to the research project ‘From Prevention to Resilience’ (FPtP). In this project, the research team has generated insights and tools for designers, policymakers, and other professionals to contribute to more resilient cities and neighborhoods. The point of departure was public space as a site for intervention, while learning from the ongoing developments revolving around the Covid-19 pandemic. During the early phases of the pandemic, governments initially focused on preventing the virus from spreading. Public spaces came to be seen as potential places for contamination. In response, fences, markings, and barrier tapes were put into place to orchestrate people’s movement and promote physical distance. With our research project, we explored the role that public space could play besides such often ad hoc preventive measures. What other challenges can public space tackle with regard to the various shocks and stressors that hit cities and neighborhoods, now and in the future? And how to tackle these challenges in an integral way? An integral approach to designing public spaces involves many disciplines, and it is to a great extent dependent on local governments’ take on public spaces. To this end, we asked relevant experts to share their disciplinary reflections on a design perspective we have developed in the FPtP project, called Human / Non-Human Public Spaces. An earlier version of this design perspective was handed over to experts to provide feedback from an urban climate adaptation perspective and from a governance and cultural change perspective. Stephanie Erwin and Jeroen Kluck provide concrete feedback on the design perspective and offer a discussion in relation to the field of urban climate resilience. Alex Straathof offers an essayistic text in which he reflects on some of the key notions of the design perspective, reflecting on some of the key notions of the design perspective based on cultural theory and his experience with interventions on the neighborhood level. In parallel, we commissioned two independent experts in the field of spatial development and governance to make a preliminary analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on the government perspectives on public spaces. Both experts were given the same question, but they applied different methods. Hugo Verschoor Plug conducted an analysis on two national policy documents and six ‘omgevingsvisies’ – i.e., strategies on spatial planning and the environment – of large and middle-sized cities: Amsterdam, Breda, The Hague, Groningen, Rotterdam and Zwolle. Denise Vrolijk was asked to interview professionals from a cross-section of Dutch Cities in order to obtain their perspectives on how local governments viewed the role of public spaces in relation to resilience. Together, these analyses provide an overview of the current state of affairs in public space and urban resilience. We thank the authors for sharing their expertise and insights and thereby contribute to the FPtR project. This project is funded by The Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development (ZonMw), part of the subsidy round ‘COVID 19: Maatschappelijke Dynamiek’, project nr. 10430032010029.

Learning communities voor MMIP's

Uitgegeven dor QEAM (Verkenning op verzoek van Topsector Energie (Human Capital Agenda) en in opdracht van Rijksdienst voor Ondernemend Nederland. Learning communities is als denkmodel verder ontwikkeld door de topsectoren om in een veranderende context (samenleving, technologie, arbeidsmarkt, etc.) een nieuw perspectief te geven op een ‘leven lang leren en ontwikkelen’. De gedachte achter learning communities is dat leren, werken en innoveren in onderlinge interactie plaatsvinden met betrokkenheid van alle relevante partijen. Hierdoor ontstaan mogelijkheden om niet alleen de noodzakelijke vorderingen te maken met opbouw van kennis, maar ook het grootschalig verspreiden van kennis en kunde – onder andere via het opleiden van professionals – te stimuleren.

Is rural the new urban? : creative placemaking in the context of non-urban communities.