ABSTRACT
The Age-friendly Cities and Communities (AFCC) programme involves identifying and investing in specific infrastructure, social service, recreation and civic engagement features that support senior citizens to age in local environments. This exercise requires the mainstreaming of an age-friendly lens that works to assess the ways in which these domains of policy affect senior citizens. Although the AFCC programme has brought an important focus on the needs and wants of senior citizens in local places, it has been critiqued for lacking substance in practice. A systematic problem is that while the concept of ‘age-friendliness’ has been directed to local spaces, less attention has been placed on the organisations and actors that enact policy to govern these spaces. The exercise of achieving an AFCC involves multiple governing actors, scales and sectors, and the relationships between them are often characterised by asymmetric resources. An age-friendly lens must thus be horizontally and vertically designed and mainstreamed. Using the City of Toronto as an illustrative case, this chapter identifies the governance features that matter in this mainstreaming exercise. More general recommendations on ways to possibly realise a more substantive AFCC programme through practice and research on policy mainstreaming are offered.
