LAUSR

Caro and Fitzgerald’s edited volume, International Perspectives on Age-Friendly Cities, is a timely effort to further research on a growing segment of the population. It should prove helpful for planners, housing officials, and gerontologists. This book is one of the first edited collections of new and published studies on an international movement: age-friendly cities and communities. The concept of age-friendly cities and communities was first introduced on a global scale when the World Health Organization launched the Global Age-Friendly Cities (AFC) initiative in 2006. In the context of global population aging, the initiative aims to promote “active aging” in cities and communities around the world, stressing the vital role of physical and social environments to achieve that goal. The book consists of two parts: (a) case studies (eight chapters) on how the AFC initiative has been implemented around the world and (b) special topics (seven chapters) that are closely related to the AFC initiative. The case study section is organized by geographic location (Europe, Asia, and North America) and the special topics part follows no obvious order. Caro and Fitzgerald, both gerontologists, consider urban planners to be one of the anticipated audiences of this book. The chapter contributors (51 total) consist of scholars and practitioners with diverse disciplinary backgrounds: aging/gerontology (10), social work (9), adult education (6), urban planning (5), architecture/urban design (5), and others (16). The AFC movement has become more than a global-scale, international organization–led movement. Now it is an emerging field open to multidisciplinary problem recognition and interdisciplinary solutions. In practice, however, the World Health Organization’s signature project, AFC, has exerted unparalleled influence on hundreds of localities around the world (258 cities in 28 countries as of March 2015). Consequently, a significant portion of the book focuses on how to implement the AFC framework, not why. Indeed, six of the eight case studies examine the implementation process of the AFC initiative in different local/national contexts. The special topics section complements the case studies and includes theoretical works from social gerontologist Andrew Scharlach and urban planner Mildred Warner, among others. The section examines a variety of age-friendly approaches in the United States: emerging community initiatives, works by a regional planning commission, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Smart Growth principles, the Village model, multigenerational planning, a “complete streets” initiative, and an evaluation of the AFC framework in the Portuguese context. I wish that the authors had included more international examples of AFC in this part of the book. The book’s main weakness is the lack of coherent organization of the special topics section. However, this weakness is fairly minor. This book can serve as a valuable introductory reader for the emerging field of age-friendly cities and communities. It is hoped that it will stimulate academics and practitioners to test the AFC framework.