ABSTRACT
The goal of most “age-friendly” efforts is to transform parts of the social and physical environments to improve quality of life for older adults (WHO, 2006). We believe that the success or failure of these attempts to modify the environment depends on the larger social, economic, political, and physical contexts in which these changes occur. This case study uses age-friendly efforts in Philadelphia to illustrate our point. We focus on two key elements in the larger city environment—the decline in working class jobs and the resulting decline in the size of the city’s population, on the one hand, and growing efforts to renew the city at the neighborhood level, on the other—as critical to the outcome of local age-friendly efforts. Although there are some unique aspects of the Philadelphia story (such as the presence of two age-friendly efforts), many of the challenges facing the city are the same as those facing other large American cities, especially in the northeast part of the country.
