Friday, August 10, 2012

Best cities for successful ageing - it is all in the eye of who created the spreadsheet

With her usual 'straight to the point' style, Laurie Orlov's recent blog about age friendly cities is bang on. 

Please read he blog because she says it so much better than me. Her basic argument is that the World Health Organisation and the Milken Institute have spent a lot of time and effort putting together list of criteria that when you put them into a spreadsheet and jiggle it around gives you a ranking of the best cities in which to age. The only problem is that the answer they produce are wrong.

New York and Boston both do very well in the listings. As she says, as do the people commenting about her blog - it all depends if you have a high income and and an established social network. If you have neither of these then they could be hell on earth. 

Neither WHO or Milken pay enough attention to the basics of what it is about cities that needs to get right as people physically age. Unless you understand that then you can end up with very silly results. Also, you have to introduce the social and economic factors about the older person. Dick Stroud 

No comments: