Health & Fitness
So, What's an 'Age-Friendly City?'
For us, being an Age-Friendly City means an opportunity to create a vibrant sense of community.
An Age-Friendly City is a people-friendly city. It's a habitat for humans, a city for all generations, a city planned and designed so that all of us may thrive.
The World Health Organization's Age-Friendly City Initiative captures all the latest research and best practices on how to create cities to better meet human needs and aspirations—for our babies, children, teens, adults, and seniors, all of us together.
Being an Age-Friendly City is all about intention, that is, the commitment and political will to support basic public and private efforts in eight categories of well-being: outdoor spaces and buildings, transportation, housing, social participation, respect and social inclusion, civic participation and employment, communication and information and community and health services.
Interestingly, all of these categories mirror the recommendations of the New Urbanism, 8-80 Cities, The Project for Public Spaces. Grand Boulevards, and, of course, Age-Friendly Cities. Rarely has there been such agreement on how to create social vibrancy, with domestic/international, multicultural examples and models of know-how.
an opportunity to create a vibrant sense of community, Los Altos as a destination and place where we can walk, bicycle, hop on and off a shuttle, and park in a variety of ways. It means promoting a sustainable city, a place where we can be physically active (healthy aging) and engage with each other in parks (or "parklets") and indoors to grow quality of life marked by civic engagement. Our successful designation—a two-year project that I proudly led—also opens the doors to significant program development funding opportunities.
We can nurture creative ideas and experiment with technology, strategic partnerships and out-of-the box thinking. This will require a little courage, collaborations, open minds, imagination, trust in the process, hope and a playful sense of socially constructing a new future. My campaign is a wish to help guide this future. anabelpelham.org
Editor's Note: Anabel Pelham is a candidate for Los Altos City Council. Any candidate can blog on Los Altos Patch, and is invited to do so. Contact losaltos@patch.com for more information, or simply click on the words, "Want to blog on Patch?" to get started.
