Humanistic planning for urban older adults
Editorial Introduction
Humanistic planning for urban older adults
2023 年 11 巻 1 号 p. 1-3
詳細
2023 年 11 巻 1 号 p. 1-3
Population aging has become a global issue essentially affecting social sustainable development. According to United Nations Population Fund, the global elderly population over the age of 60 years may increase to 2 billion in 2050, approximately representing 22% of the world population (United Nations, 2019). If we turn to China, it is predicted that the proportion over 65 years old will rise to 25.3 percent until 2030 and reach 35.1 percent in 2050 (United Nations, 2017). Comparing with other area, the denser population, longer life expectancy, and decreasing fertility rate make large cities more sensitive to the population aging. In this context, whether older adults can fairly enjoy high-quality urban services is recognized as a critical issue for planning practice.
During the past decades, planning scholars have advocated for elderly-oriented planning. However, urban older adults are still facing with a series of issues affecting their life quality. One of the reasons is a lack of comprehensive understanding on older adults’ behaviour mechanism, which shows significant difference compared with that of young people. Furthermore, new initiatives (such as smart cities) and emerging technologies (such as automated vehicles) rapidly change both urban environment and the residents’ lifestyle. However, older adults may not easily adapt to the change taken by novel technologies and planning concepts.
Because of the significance of urban population aging issue, we organized a special section on humanistic planning for urban older adults. Among the submissions, five papers were accepted, which include one review article and four research articles. These articles mainly focus on transportation planning for urban older adults and cover several essential directions such as traffic safety, transport and health, public transportation, and autonomous vehicle. One article comprehensively reviews the cutting-edge research on traffic safety related with older adults, without a specific case. The remaining four papers select Beijing, a typical Chinese metropolis with more than three million older adults, as case study to demonstrate the research issues.
As the only review article among the accepted papers, Gu, Lu et al. (2023) retried the older adults-involved traffic crash analysis studies from 2015 to the present. On this basis, the patterns and spatiotemporal characteristics of older adults-involved crash were summarized. In addition, they discovered that both traditional statistical models and the machine learning were applied in previous studies to explore the relationship between potential influencing factors and older adults-involved crash. The verified influencing factors can be roughly grouped into three categories: human factor, vehicle factor, and environmental factor. Finally, future research directions were proposed from the perspectives of heterogeneity in samples, limitation in methods, and absence of potential influencing factors.
Chen, Yuan et al. (2023) also focus on traffic safety of older adults; they examined the correlation between elderly pedestrian traffic accident and urban built environment using geographically weighted regression. The data of 2,347 elderly pedestrian-involved traffic accidents happened in 2015 in Beijing was extracted to identify the significant influencing factors. The results reveal that average traffic speed, average size of intersections, elderly population density, road network density and service facility density positively affect the density of local elderly pedestrian-involved traffic accidents in subdistrict scale. Consequently, spatial heterogeneity of the influence of these factors was discovered, which can provide valuable implications for planners.
In addition to traffic safety, traffic mode choice behaviour of older adults is another issue that is of concern for improving elderly-oriented planning of urban transportation system. Two articles address the transformation of older adults’ traffic mode choice behaviour after significant change happened in urban transportation system, including one article considering the influence of COVID-19 pandemic and the other article regarding autonomous vehicle. Yan, Jin et al. (2023) constructed a structural equation model to quantitatively analyse the co-effect of attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control, cognitive risk perception, and affective risk perception on the behavioural intention of the elderly’s bus travel. The results indicate that older adults still give priority to the travel mode of bus under the influence of pandemic, which magnifies the necessity to evaluate the countermeasures to better guarantee the elderly’s bus travel under the requirements of pandemic prevention. On the other hand, Hao, Hou et al. (2023) investigated older adults’ acceptance of autonomous vehicle services based on a questionnaire survey. Ordered logistic, marginal effect, and clustering analysis are successively conducted to explore the quantitative evidence, based on what the recommendations for policymakers and service providers to improve management and service quality are discussed.
Regarding the relationship between transport and the health of older adults, Liang, Guan et al. (2023) select three old residential areas in Beijing to investigate older adults on their daily travel, activities and health using questionnaire and interview. Rather interesting correlations of older adults’ travel condition with their body mass index, the number of diseases, and self-rated health status were discovered. Although this study restricted to preliminary investigation, it has thrown up many issues which are illuminative for future research on transport and health.
All the articles included in this special section were presented at the 2022 International Symposium on Urban Aging Planning & Elderly Travel which was held online on March 6, 2022. Although this section doesn’t cover all the relevant topics on elderly-oriented planning, the five published articles allow us to present a coarse snapshot of planning issues regarding urban older adults. We hope that more scholars and planners can be informed and inspired by the special section and further advance the humanistic planning for urban older adults.
This special section was sponsored by Beijing Key Laboratory of Traffic Engineering. The Beijing Key Laboratory of Traffic Engineering collaborated with IRSPSD to host the 2022 International Symposium on Urban Aging Planning & Elderly Travel Issues in preparation for this special section in March 2022. This special section was also supported by a grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (52008006). We are particularly grateful to the reviewers for their most generous support with precious time and valuable comments.
