Cities need to do more for seniors: prof
Meghan Joy decided to research the role cities play to meet the needs of senior citizens while she was living in Toronto, after witnessing some of the struggles her senior neighbour faced.
“We were helping her bring her garbage out to the curb, we were helping her get groceries — doing a lot of informal work,” Joy said, adding the elderly woman eventually died by falling down the stairs. “It was kind of this moment where I was like, you know what, how many people are living in these difficult situations?”
Joy, an assistant professor in the political science department at Concordia University who has a PhD in policy studies, wanted to understand the ins and outs of how cities support senior citizens in practice. She did interviews with more than 80 people, including different actors in local government, the transit commission, the social housing commission, non-profit organizations and senior citizen activists in Toronto.
Through her research, Joy said she realized people tend to view seniors as a “throwaway” population.
“It’s coming from this subtle undertone of you have to prove your human worth,” she said. “I think we really need to think about ageism.”
After finding out about the World Health Organization’s movement on age-friendly cities, Joy realized a lot of the research related to seniors doesn’t come from an urban politics and policy perspective.
Seniors need more time to cross streets, they need park benches in shady spots, public restrooms and clearly marked street names, Joy said.
“Our cities are built for a working-age population. They move and operate according to the working-age population.
“All things really lead to urban planning, with respect to making sure that neighbourhoods are complete, that people can walk to get their groceries, to go to the community centre, to go to the library, that that’s more amenable,” Joy said.
“When we shut down sidewalks for construction or when we move a bus stop, are we thinking about the needs of the people that are living around there?”
Montreal, in particular has some interesting challenges and opportunities in terms of increasing accessibility because of its borough system, Joy said.
“There’s kind of that fragmentation that happens in Montreal. But also, the boroughs do offer more opportunities for really local policy-making.”
Though both Montreal and Toronto are investing in making public transit more accessible, Joy said more could be done, like looking into methods of transportation such as pickup services for people with certain needs.
Joy also said support is needed for people who, like the neighbour who inspired her research, can use help with day-to-day things like changing light bulbs and taking out the trash. Library programs, computer literacy programs and checkups on seniors during heat waves and ice storms are needed, she added.
“It’s very important that every community or every borough has their own plan, because every community is different and every community has its own reality,” said Raphaël Massé, co-ordinator at the Table de concertation des aînés de Montréal, an organization created by the provincial government to enhance the link between senior citizen non-profit organizations in the city.
Joy also noted a need for programs for LGBTQI+ seniors and seniors from different ethnic groups.
“There might be some really great programs in different places, you don’t want to discount that, but overall we are clearly not taking an intersectional aging lens to things,” she said, noting that consultations are necessary to determine the needs of different seniors.
“If there’s one big mistake that should not be made, it’s to take seniors as one big homogeneous group,” Massé said. “Sometimes that’s what we feel (is happening) in public policies. Especially in Montreal where there’s a diversity of seniors ... You need to always take that into consideration.”
The next phase of Joy’s research is to explore accessibility more in depth in Montreal. Recently, she has been working with Montreal West, which she said is in the process of developing a seniors strategy.
“I think part of the problem is it’s not happening quickly enough, and especially in big cities like Toronto and Montreal we think about cities like service providers and not necessarily policy actors,” Joy said.
“How do we co-ordinate all of these people together, to really change our thinking around serving seniors?”