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| AARP volunteers get ready to begin a walkability audit uptown with guest speaker Gil Penalosa of 8-80 Cities in October. Photo: Juan Ossa |
Monday morning, I learned that the Town of Matthews in
southern Mecklenburg County is the first, and to date only, municipality in
North Carolina to sign on as an AARP Age Friendly Community.
That AARP initiative, as it turns out, is an affiliate of the WHO’s Age-Friendly
Cities and Communities Program, a global effort dating to 2006 to help
cities prepare for both increasing urbanization and for an aging population, as
the huge Baby Boom generation hits retirement age.
Michael Olender, the Charlotte-based associate state
director for AARP, says he’s in conversations with the Charlotte mayor’s office
about whether Charlotte should also seek to join.
What does “age-friendly community” have to do with
walkability and livability? Simply this: As planners and policymakers focus on
the wishes and needs of the huge Millennial generation, Olender says, not much
attention is being paid to the needs of what the older generation wants. But,
he says, “What Boomers want mirrors very closely what Millennials want. They
want to walk. They want good public transit.”
Fast-forward a few hours. I’m at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg
Planning Commission’s monthly work session. Planning commissioner Deb Ryan, an
associate professor of urban design at UNC Charlotte, is giving a short
presentation on the role of livability and public health in city planning. She
pointedly did not call it “sustainability.”
“ ‘Sustainability’ means everything and nothing,” Ryan said.
Instead, she talked about becoming a “livable city.”