ABSTRACT
Although the main purpose of the urban planning professional has been constantly debated throughout planning history from the 17th century to the present, how to provide a supportive physical environment for sustainable developments has always been the core context for planning research and practice. Over time, urban planning has expected to become an effective tool for accelerating economic prosperity and for seeking for material success, and its emphasis on facilitating well-being and healthy place-making has surged from time to time (Barton, 2016; Ng, 2016). This chapter first points out the emerging changes of population structure and sometimes depopulation instead of population growth for modern urban planning practices in many cities in the 21st century. A brief review of the healthy cities project and age-friendly cities project is undertaken as well as the planning strategies for delivering healthy cities over the past two decades. As we realize that there have already been some mature planning and design instruments applied to support well-being in urban areas, we would like to argue that when urban planning encountered the population ageing trend for the first time, there became a need to rethink the relationship between the built environment and an older population. We believe that the complex issues of older people versus a built environment at different development stages pose new challenges for delivering a friendly environment. Hence, it is necessary to address Age-Friendly Cities (AFC) issues in a more sophisticated way and to take the urban development history of each city into account. Accordingly, a case study of Tainan City adopting Spatial Autocorrelation Analysis (SAA) was conducted to explore the significant locational association between historical parts of a city with their older dwellers. In the final part of this chapter, we propose that there should be four types of AFC planning and design strategies based on the combination of the development time frame of cities and population ageing speed. We suggest that in pursue of AFC, it is the planners’ duty to consider existing urban contexts physically and culturally at the same time. To this end, the modern urban planning and design professional can truly play a key role in shaping the place where older people can enjoy an active living lifestyle.
