A few years ago, Philippa Clarke and her mother visited York, England, where her mother was born. Her mother wanted to see the ancient part of the city, founded by the Romans in the first century A.D. on the banks of the River Ouse.
But in order to do that, she had to leave her wheelchair behind. With Clarke’s help, she made it to the top of the city wall, raising her cane in triumph.
Shortly after returning home, her mother was taking a grandson to school. As she was rounding a corner on her motorized scooter, she hit a patch of uneven pavement and fell, breaking a hip. She hasn’t been the same since.
Her mother’s long struggle to function with multiple sclerosis was a major factor in Clarke’s decision to study how the physical environment affects older people with disabilities. And her mother’s accident has strengthened her conviction that disability isn’t solely a result of an individual’s physical condition — it’s a function of the gap between a person’s capabilities and their environment.
Now a researcher at the Institute for Social Research (ISR), Clarke headed to England again this spring to participate in a scientific study tour designed to foster multinational collaboration on how age-supportive built environments can help to foster the World Health Organization’s vision for age-friendly cities.
Clarke has conducted research with collaborators at Michigan and other U.S. universities that clearly shows a strong link between the prevalence of potholes, broken curbs and cracked sidewalks and mobility problems among older adults. Those people with balance problems and leg weakness who lived on streets in fair or poor condition were more than four times as likely as those living on streets in good condition to report a lot of difficulty walking two or three blocks.
With more people on both sides of the pond aging-in-place, governments are grappling with a number of programs and policy initiatives designed to promote livable communities across the lifespan. But the UK and Canadian governments are much further along in this effort than the United States, Clarke says.
“The UK and Canada have much larger populations of older adults,” she says. “And the UK is a very densely populated country, with 60 million people living in an area smaller than the state of Oregon. As a result, community design has become a critical issue.
But it isn’t just the physical facilities and research-driven policy initiatives that account for the gap between age-friendly urban environments in the United States and the UK. “In the U.S., there’s the tremendous reliance on the automobile, which presents a major problem when people are older and can no longer drive. Public transportation here in the U.S. is just not that well-established in most places, compared to the UK.”
