ESPON Conference Week on Ageing // Adapting European Cities to Population Ageing: Policy Challenges and Best Practices

Population ageing raises common challenges for cities. This challenge has become even more evident in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis that has affected our whole society, but older people in particular. The crisis has literally threatened their lives, and those who survived have been faced with increased loneliness. This shows once more how important it is to design our cities age-friendly and keep older people’s interest in mind in policy making.

A group of cities, who were forming the Eurocities Urban Ageing Working Group, asked ESPON’s support to investigate the effectiveness of policies and initiatives to develop age-friendly cities. In the first half of 2020, the ESPON ACPA (Adapting European Cities to Population Ageing) project was completed with a final report, a policy handbook supporting the decade of healthy and inclusive urban ageing, case study reports, maps and figures.

Together with AGE Platform Europe, Eurocities, Greater Manchester Combined Authority/Greater Manchester Ageing Hub (lead stakeholder of ESPON ACPA) and the World Health Organisation, ESPON is organising an online conference week about population ageing. The week starts with an opening event, with a number of high-level speakers and experts, including vice president of the European Commission and Commissioner on Democracy and Demography Dubravka Šuica.

The opening day is followed by sessions on the case study cities investigated in ACPA: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Gothenburg, Greater Manchester, Hengelo, Nantes, Oslo and Zaragoza.

Further information