Student Independent Projects Environmental Studies 2015: Age Friendly Communities: An Assessment of the Built Environment of Downtown Corner Brook

Abstract

The concept of an age-friendly community is one that provides supportive physical and social environments enabling older people to live active, safe, and meaningful lives, while also providing the opportunity for older people to contribute to community life. The age-friendly community concept garnered much international attention when it was adopted by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a policy response to demographic ageing and urbanization. In 2007 the WHO published a report titled Global Age-Friendly Cities: A Guide, which highlights a critical issue and provides eight broad domains of features that must be considered to make a community age-friendly. The purpose of this study was to apply two of the domains from the WHO checklist to the downtown area of Corner Brook to assess where improvements can be made in terms of accessibility to older persons and those with disabilities.