International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health Article “Who Doesn’t Think about Technology When Designing Urban Environments for Older People?” A Case Study Approach to a Proposed Extension of the WHO’s Age-Friendly Cities Model Hannah R. Marston 1,* and Joost van Hoof 2,3 1 Health & Wellbeing Priority Research Area, School of Health, Wellbeing & Social Care, The Open University, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire MK7 6HH, UK 2 Faculty of Social Work & Education, The Hague University of Applied Sciences, Johanna Westerdijkplein 75, 2521 EN Den Haag, The Netherlands;
[email protected] 3 Department of Spatial Economy, Faculty of Environmental Engineering and Geodesy, Wrocław University of Environmental and Life Sciences, ul. Grunwaldzka 55, 50-357 Wrocław, Poland * Correspondence:
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[email protected]; Tel.: +44-(0)78-1550-7547 Received: 23 August 2019; Accepted: 16 September 2019; Published: 20 September 2019 Abstract: The World Health Organization (WHO) strives to assist and inspire cities to become more “age-friendly”, and the fundamentals are included in the Global Age-Friendly Cities Guide. An age-friendly city enables residents to grow older actively within their families, neighbourhoods and civil society, and offers extensive opportunities for the participation of older people in the community. Over the decades, technology has become essential for contemporary and future societies, and even more imperative as the decades move on, given we are nearly in our third decade of the twenty-first century. Yet, technology is not explicitly considered in the 8-domain model by the WHO, which describes an age-friendly city.