Co-creating Age-Friendly Futures

Abstract

This article examines how cross-sector collaborations and leadership can be leveraged to advance age-friendly initiatives, with a particular focus on the role of co-production and the involvement of older adults. It first reviews examples of age-friendly initiatives from various regions in the Global North and South, highlighting multisector collaboration. Next, it presents case studies from Manchester (UK)—an international leader in age-friendly programs—that showcase co-production and the active participation of diverse groups of older adults. Finally, the article identifies key leadership principles and skills, as recognized by age-friendly leaders themselves, that are critical for overcoming barriers to collaboration and ensuring the sustainability of age-friendly initiatives.

Key Words

cross-sector collaborations, age-friendly initiatives, co-production, Manchester

This article explores the roles of cross-sectorial collaborations, leadership, and co-production in developing Age-Friendly Cities and Communities (AFCC). It contributes to an expanding body of work on the “age-friendly” movement, which was initiated by a 2007 World Health Organization study identifying the characteristics of AFCC, and expanded in 2010 through the Global Network for AFCC.

The network now (as of 2025) includes more than 1,700 cities across 60 countries, all working to improve services and infrastructure for aging populations. Its rapid growth reflects an increasing recognition of the challenges posed by population aging, and the urgent need to improve both the built environment—housing, transportation, and urban design—and the social environment, by fostering social and civic participation (Buffel et al., 2024; Van Hoof et al., 2021).

But the movement faces significant challenges. Austerity measures, limited resources, and shrinking public services have placed immense strain on local governments and age-friendly programs. These difficulties are compounded by a lack of sustained political commitment and widening socioeconomic inequalities, raising critical questions about the sustainability of age-friendly strategies and their ability to improve the well-being and equitable participation of older adults (Buffel & Phillipson, 2024; Greenfield, 2018).

In this context, cross-sector collaboration has become increasingly vital to the success of age-friendly initiatives. Partnerships between stakeholders from local authorities, healthcare, public health, community organizations, and private businesses enable resource pooling, the sharing and leveraging of expertise, and the creation of synergies to address the diverse needs of older populations. Fulmer et al. (2020) advocated for the creation of an integrated “age-friendly ecosystem” where efforts across healthcare, public health, and the lived environment work together to promote healthy aging.

Strategic leadership is essential in facilitating these collaborations, aligning diverse interests, creating a shared vision, and sustaining momentum for collaborative action across sectors (McGarry et al., 2024). Despite the expansion of AFCC programs, there remain significant gaps in understanding how to mobilize diverse actors, align priorities, create sustainable partnerships, and ensure that older adults, especially those from marginalized groups, play a central role in shaping these initiatives (Buffel et al., 2024). This article addresses this gap by examining how cross-sectoral collaborations and leadership can be leveraged to advance age-friendly initiatives.

Cross-sector Collaborations in Global Age-Friendly Initiatives

Age-friendly initiatives have gained traction globally, albeit more extensively in the Global North than in the Global South. Cities and communities have implemented several strategies to enhance older adults’ quality of life. Rémillard-Boilard et al. (2021) undertook a review of 11 age-friendly programs, highlighting the crucial role of cross-sector collaborations in meeting the diverse needs of older populations. Their review draws on information from program representatives and related literature, offering examples of successes and challenges across different countries.

A key factor in the success of age-friendly initiatives was the establishment of partnerships with diverse stakeholders, including local councils, community organizations, businesses, universities, and older adults, and working across domains such as housing, transport, health, and urban planning. In Akita, Japan, such collaborations have been especially effective in addressing challenges arising from rapid population aging, with nearly a third of its residents being ages 65 or older. One major initiative has been the “Age-Friendly Partner” scheme, which involves 88 private-sector organizations, ranging from banks to beauty salons. These companies collaborate with city government and community organizations to provide services tailored to older adults and promote volunteering and employment opportunities, illustrating the potential of public–private collaborations in driving age-friendly change (Rémillard-Boilard et al., 2021).

Rémillard-Boilard et al. (2021) found that cities employed various mechanisms to facilitate cross-sector collaboration. In Dijon, France, l’Observatoire de l’Âge brought together 83 stakeholders (2018 figures) including elected officials, residents, experts, and researchers, who were organized into committees to develop proposals on aging-related issues. This participatory approach was beneficial because it encouraged stakeholders with diverse perspectives to compromise and prioritize. Similar models have been found in Brussels, Belgium, Manchester, UK, Loncoche, Chile, and Ottawa, Canada, where advisory bodies of older residents play a central role in shaping the direction of local age-friendly programs and informing policy decisions (see also, Buffel & Phillipson, 2024).

Research has also highlighted the importance of engaging actors across multiple levels of governance. As the movement has progressed, scaling projects from local to regional and national levels has become crucial. In the Spanish Basque country, more than 50 municipalities joined the age-friendly movement, supported by the Department of Employment and Social Policies and the Matia Gerontological Institute. In Melville, Australia, collaboration with the Government of Western Australia was key to the program’s success, while Brussels, Belgium, and Dijon, France, aimed to partner with regional and national organizations to address broader issues like social exclusion and isolation (Rémillard-Boilard et al., 2021).

Participants highlighted new collaborations and the strengthening of existing partnerships as key achievements, enabling cities to “benefit from the expertise of a variety of actors” (Portland, Oregon, U.S.); “develop a wider range of initiatives” (Manchester, UK); “involve the voices of different groups” (Melville, Australia); “make local actors more aware of the issues surrounding ageing” (Guadalajara, Mexico); and “improve the dialogue between the city council and citizens” (Basque Country, Spain) (Rémillard-Boilard et al., 2021, pp. 7–8).

Despite progress, involving key actors in age-friendly initiatives remains a challenge, especially with budgetary constraints and competing priorities. There could be greater impact if public and private sectors applied an “aging lens” to their work, ensuring that transportation, housing, and urban planning reflect the changing needs of older populations. In Manchester, leaders advocate for integrating “age-friendliness” into all aspects of policymaking.

However, limited engagement from sectors concerned with urban development may reflect what Hammond et al. (2024) defined as spatial ageism—the systematic exclusion of older adults from decisions about the built environment, leading to spaces that fail to address the inequalities and complexities of later life. Overcoming this requires placing older adults at the center of these processes, ensuring their voices shape the future of age-friendly initiatives.

Co-production and the Role of Older Adults: Lessons from Manchester

Co-production refers to the collaborative process of designing and delivering services or interventions that actively involve those directly affected (Ostrom, 1996). In age-friendly initiatives, co-production ensures older adults play a central role shaping the environments and services that impact their lives, recognizing them as experts on their needs and experiences (James & Buffel, 2022).

But co-production goes beyond participation, emphasizing the redistribution of power and prioritizing the voices of marginalized groups. In this way, it seeks to break down barriers that exclude certain populations from decision-making processes, especially those facing intersectional disadvantages across race, gender, class, and disability. Co-production is not just about integrating older adults into pre-existing structures, but also transforming these structures to be more inclusive and just, ensuring that older adults, especially those who are often excluded, are central to shaping age-friendly environments and co-creating the systems affecting their daily lives (Buffel et al., 2024; Yeh et al., 2024).

In Manchester, co-production has been central to the age-friendly policy agenda, with diverse groups of older adults playing key roles in shaping initiatives to improve their communities' quality of life (Buffel, et al., 2024; McGarry et al., 2024). The following three projects illustrate this.

The Urban Villages Project: Co-producing Age-Friendly Community Interventions

The Urban Villages project, a participatory action research project conducted between 2017 and 2019 in Manchester, explored new approaches to supporting “aging in place,” enabling older adults to remain in their homes and communities as they age (Goff & Doran, 2024). It assessed the potential of the “Village model,” a community-based initiative originally developed in the United States that connects older residents in neighborhoods to collectively organize support, services, and activities.

Villages provide services such as transportation, home maintenance, and social engagement through events and volunteering, with most services shaped and led by older adult residents (Greenfield et al., 2013; Lehning et al., 2017).

The Urban Villages project adapted the Village model to two low-income Manchester neighborhoods—Brunswick and Levenshulme—where older residents worked with researchers and community organizations to co-design initiatives addressing issues such as social isolation, health, and access to services. For example, the Meal Buddies initiative in Levenshulme was a resident-led collaboration that organized regular communal meals for isolated older residents, addressing poor nutrition while fostering social interaction. The Women’s Footprints project in Brunswick, a multi-ethnic, intergenerational support network, fostered mutual aid among women in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, the Neighbourly Gardening Project in Brunswick helped restore garden spaces, which were disrupted by neighborhood building work, with a group of older, housebound residents, promoting physical activity and community engagement (Goff & Doran, 2024).

The Urban Villages project highlights the benefits and challenges of co-production in low-income neighborhoods. Involving older adults as key actors made the age-friendly initiatives more relevant and fostered a strong sense of community and local ownership. But sustained involvement proved difficult due to residents’ fluctuating health and financial problems, while navigating power dynamics between residents, professionals, and other stakeholders posed additional challenges. The project showed that such initiatives require redistributing power to ensure older adults have a genuine stake in shaping interventions that affect their lives. This requires a long-term investment in building trust, nurturing local leadership, and supporting sustained participation, particularly for those most excluded from decision-making processes. Without such efforts, co-production risks reinforcing the very social inequities it seeks to address (Goff & Doran, 2024).

The Old Moat Project: Co-designing Age-Friendly Neighborhoods

The Old Moat project is another example of how co-production can transform urban environments to better reflect the lived experiences of older residents. Led by the Centre for Spatial Inclusion at the Manchester School of Architecture, this project applied age-friendly design principles to a neighborhood in Manchester, with older residents playing a key role in redesigning their physical and social environment. “Age-friendliness” was defined as a collaborative, spatial process requiring cross-disciplinary cooperation and a deep understanding of spatial dynamics. “Age-friendly design” was framed as a bottom-up participatory process where older people actively analyzed and articulated their experiences and needs (White & Hammond, 2018).

Extensive engagement with residents led to the creation of a neighborhood action plan with specific interventions to improve age-friendliness. A key achievement was the way it enabled older residents to actively “occupy” public spaces. The introduction of strategically placed benches was not just about providing rest stops, but about transforming these spaces into social hubs where residents could gather and interact, reclaiming previously underused or neglected public space. Similarly, improving the accessibility of key local routes, such as pathways to bus stops, the project helped create a more socially connected environment. The success of these interventions lay not just in the physical changes but in how they aligned with older residents’ daily practices and movements, embedding their lived experiences into the neighborhood’s design.

The project also faced challenges, particularly in balancing the diverse perspectives of older residents and professional stakeholders. Reconciling local knowledge preferences with urban design standards often proved challenging, especially when residents’ desires conflicted with assumptions made by urban planners. For example, it became clear that ideas about where and how people gathered in the neighborhood were often inaccurate, highlighting the need for spatial interventions to be grounded in the realities of everyday life. A more flexible, nuanced approach is needed for co-production, where spatial understanding and resident involvement are fully integrated into a responsive process that adapts to the evolving needs of the community (White & Hammond, 2018).

Involving Older People as Co-researchers in Developing Age-Friendly Communities

Another co-production approach in Manchester’s age-friendly program involved training 18 older residents (ages 58–74) from low-income neighborhoods as co-researchers in the Researching Age-friendly Communities project to assess the “age-friendliness” of their communities. Using a participatory action research methodology, co-researchers were involved at every stage, from shaping research questions to disseminating findings and evaluating the research.

Co-researchers also conducted 68 semi-structured interviews with other older residents, particularly those at risk of social isolation, to explore their needs for aging well in the neighborhood. This approach was designed to shift the balance of power, recognizing older adults as experts of their lived experiences, and transforming their role from passive “subjects” of research to “active agents” shaping the study’s direction and outcomes, and influencing the development of policies and interventions in their neighborhoods (Buffel, 2015, 2018a, 2018b; Doran & Buffel, 2018).

The co-research approach had several benefits. First, involving older adults as co-researchers improved data quality, as interviewees felt more at ease sharing experiences with peers of a similar age or background, including shared ethnicity and local knowledge. Second, co-researchers’ insider knowledge facilitated participant recruitment, especially of those whose voices often remain “unheard” in traditional research (older adults facing social exclusion, health problems, isolation, and poverty). Third, the approach fostered a sense of ownership and empowerment, with co-researchers playing a key role in developing contextually relevant policies. One tangible outcome was the restoration of a much-needed bus service, previously cut due to funding pressures, which caused significant barriers for older residents in accessing essential services. Co-researchers identified this as a major concern and played a key role in partnering with other groups to advocate for its return (Buffel, 2018a, 2018b).

This project also faced challenges. Managing expectations was especially difficult in the context of austerity, as cuts to services like community centers, libraries, and health services made it hard to promote “age-friendliness” when life was increasingly experienced as age-unfriendly.

Other challenges included conflicting expectations, power differentials, and inequalities among community groups. Recruiting and training older adults as co-researchers risked further empowering those with greater social capital, while unintentionally excluding more vulnerable groups, potentially reinforcing existing inequalities. To address these issues, the project provided research training, encouraged reflexive practice, and offered a “safe space” through reflection meetings to discuss ethical challenges and emotional strains. The group also co-created a framework for “good care” in research relationships, based on confidentiality, empathy, and emotional well-being to maintain trust and ethical integrity (Buffel, 2018a, 2018b). Despite these strategies, challenges persisted, highlighting the need for continuous, flexible approaches to navigate the ongoing tensions and complexities of participatory research.

Leadership for Age-Friendly Change

Leadership is essential in leveraging cross-sector collaboration for meaningful age-friendly change. The guide Advancing Age-Friendly Cities and Communities: The Crucial Role of Leadership draws on insights from leaders in Europe and North America, emphasizing the need for strong partnerships between local government, healthcare, community organizations, and the private sector to maximize impact in age-friendly work (McGarry et al., 2024). These leaders identified several key strategies: developing clear and compelling narratives to engage diverse stakeholders, promoting interdisciplinary teamwork to address the multifaceted nature of aging, and actively confronting agism as a barrier to progress. Additionally, leaders highlighted the importance of cultivating relationships across sectors, adapting leadership approaches to local contexts, and strategically directing efforts and resources. By seizing opportunities and building coalitions, age-friendly leaders can drive sustainable and effective change, even when facing significant challenges such as austerity, the decline of public investment, and competing policy priorities (McGarry et al., 2024).

One of the key challenges is ensuring diversity and representation in leadership when addressing the needs and aspirations of various groups of older adults. Barbara Douglas from the Elders Council of Newcastle, UK, advocates for integrating diverse perspectives from the outset and at strategic levels to broaden participation (McGarry et al., 2024).

Research shows that many older adults, particularly racial and ethnic minorities, refugees, those with health needs, and those living in poverty, remain underrepresented in age-friendly initiatives (Buffel et al., 2024). Leadership in age-friendly work must become more diverse, ensuring the voices of diverse communities are fully represented in decision-making processes (Yarker & Buffel, 2022).

At the same time, it is crucial to recognize that strong leadership often comes from grassroots organizations and informal networks, particularly among those with lived experiences of aging-related issues (McGarry et al., 2024). This is especially important given the experiences of aging across different socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic communities, many which may not be involved in formal sociopolitical efforts or affiliated with established organizations (Lang et al., 2024). Recognizing and building on the contributions of older adults in these communities is key to centering and amplifying age-friendly work in a more organic and equitable way (Yeh et al., 2024). True inclusivity requires leadership and initiatives to adapt, reflect, and champion the diverse realities of aging.

Conclusion

This article highlights the critical role that cross-sector collaborations and diverse forms of leadership play in advancing age-friendly futures, drawing on examples from cities and communities within the Global Network of AFCC. By uniting stakeholders from government, healthcare, community organizations, the private sector, and older adults, cross-sector collaborations have the potential to create an integrated age-friendly ecosystem that addresses the diverse and intersecting inequalities affecting older populations. Such collaborations are crucial for pooling resources, sharing expertise, and developing innovative solutions to improve the built and social environment. Yet, the long-term sustainability of age-friendly programs relies on leaders maintaining momentum, navigating shifting political and economic pressures, and securing long-term commitment across sectors. A key argument of this article is that co-production must be central to these collaborations, with diverse groups of older adults taking a leading role in driving age-friendly initiatives.

The examples from Manchester show that co-production is not merely about “involving” older adults but about transforming the structures and systems that shape our lives, redistributing power and resources to create more inclusive environments. By working with older adults, age-friendly initiatives can better address the intersecting inequalities faced by many older populations. This shift toward co-production fosters an emancipatory approach that redresses social inequities and restores the agency and rights of older adults in shaping their environments.

By fostering such approaches, age-friendly work can become a driving force for broader social change, aligning itself with other social rights movements—such as those advocating for racial justice, gender equality, disability rights, and climate justice—while challenging oppressive structures and contributing to a more just aging society. To advance this goal, age-friendly leadership must become more diverse, shifting power to include a broader range of voices, challenge entrenched power dynamics, and ensure that older adults, especially those most at risk of exclusion, are at the forefront of transforming their communities and driving the age-friendly movement forward.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Manchester Urban Ageing Research Group, especially Patty Doran, Luciana Lang, Sophie Yarker, Paul McGarry, and Chris Phillipson, for their support. I also acknowledge funding from The Leverhulme Trust (RL-2019-011) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/N002180/1).

Tine Buffel, PhD, is a professor of Sociology and Social Gerontology at the University of Manchester, where she directs the Manchester Urban Ageing Research Group (MUARG)—an interdisciplinary group bringing together scholars from sociology, geography, anthropology, political science and architecture, with an interest in understanding and improving the experience of ageing in place in urban environments.

Photo credit: Shutterstock/PeopleImages.com - Yuri A

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