Bringing Melbourne Back Better - for people of all ages
This note suggests making age-inclusiveness central to Melbourne’s post-pandemic plans. Specifically, it suggests redefining the goal of ‘liveability’ to cater for all ages, integrating health and wellness throughout the city, creating mechanisms to activate and engage older residents, developing non-financial metrics for wellbeing and building an ‘agetech’ hub. Tomorrow’s Aging2.0 Melbourne event is starting to build momentum in this direction.
The pandemic is forcing cities to rethink how they attract and serve their residents
The pandemic will cause talent to become more mobile. 43% of people living in California are considering leaving, due to over inflated cost of living and the increasing ability to work from anywhere. Companies like Facebook, Twitter and Square have shifted to permanent remote work. In the US, 68% of large companies are downsizing their office space. New working and living options are emerging. Bermuda is offering year-long, renewable residency for people looking to escape covid-19 and work remotely, while places as diverse as Japan, Sicily and Cyprus are offering tourists inducements such as travel stipends, and even paying for their holiday if they get sick.
New metrics are becoming more important. The pandemic - and prospect of more of them - has heightened the importance of good public health services, efficient transport infrastructure, lower air pollution levels (which have been found to impact covid-19 mortality rates) and plenty of outdoor space. There is also a correlation between the hardest hit countries and their levels of inequality, which makes intuitive sense when many can’t afford not to work or take preventative measures.
As the pandemic rages, cities around the world are in various stages of planning for what comes next. While there are a number of promising initiatives such as ‘slow streets’, others worry that the opportunity may already have passed.
Melbourne has got some making up to do
Melbourne, according to the Daily Mail, is miserable. And while that tabloid isn’t known for a close relationship with the truth, the city is certainly not living its best life. A ten-week lockdown plus job insecurity has hammered the economy and local spirits. This has no doubt come as a shock to this confident city, ranked by the Economist Intelligence Unit as the world’s ‘most liveable’ from 2010 to 2017. For the past two years Vienna has overtaken Mebourne to get top spot. While Melbourne has been bumped down in 2019 Sydney moved up from fifth place to third. The more business-focused Mercer list puts Melbourne at a lowly 17th place.
Within Australia, Melbourne has suffered through the covid-19 crisis more than the other states, and from my living room lockdown vantage point, I have seen increasing energy and dynamism from innovation hubs in other capital cities, especially Adelaide and Brisbane, whilst the southern state has been forced into a mere spectator. Once ‘all in this together’, Melburnians have become the pandemic pariahs of the nation, forcing a separatist view in which it is every state for themselves, fueling competitiveness between capital cities.
Most tragic, and particularly significant in the context of my proposal for Melbourne’s new priorities, has been its failure to safeguard older residents; with 381 of the country’s 412 deaths in aged care being in Victoria. The finger pointing between federal, state and private sector players is unlikely to resolve anything, though providing significant additional fuel for the awareness and importance of the ongoing Royal Commission into Aged Care. If there’s a silver lining to the pandemic it may well be a new cross party consensus, humility, boldness and budget to commit to the major systemic reforms and best in class efforts that are needed. The industry is reeling and public confidence in the sector is at a low ebb, and there can’t be any excuses for not taking seriously the calls for reform that have been growing ever louder in recent years.
A emerging effort taking place to shape Melbourne2.0
Melbourne Lord Mayor Sally Capp is convening a star chamber of local change-makers, captains of industry and political influencers to advise her on big ideas for how to bring Melbourne Back Better. Aside from some political carping, the idea seems hard to critique - after all, why not get a group of smart successful people to share their ideas for free?
If the ideas are as good as those of STREAT’s Rebecca Scott, we’re in for a treat. She envisages doubling the green coverage in the city to 40 per cent, building vertical farms, providing clean air, fresh produce and even new jobs. But greenscaping the city addresses just one area of liveability. From what I can see as an outsider, there’s a gap around how the city is going to address changing demographics - not only to make up for the failures in aged care, but to develop fresh thinking.
Melbourne should make age-inclusiveness central to its new plans
It’s hard to know how age-friendly Melbourne is - there are few agreed metrics or standards. One data point, it’s not one of the 1000+ cities that are members of the WHO age-friendly cities program, but in its defence many of the aspects of age-friendly cities overlap with the liveability indices on which the city is world class.
It is likely however, that most of these liveability indices are not measuring the experience of people of all ages. A 2019 report on disability by the University of Melbourne for example uses census data showing that just 2% of residents require assistance with core activities of daily living. Yet, we know that about half of Australians aged 65–74 had 5 or more long-term health conditions (increasing to 70% of those aged 85 and over), and the number of people over 65 in Australia is growing fast; from 15% today to 22% by 2050.
Cities that work for older people generally work for everyone. Streetscapes that are hard to navigate with a wheelchair or Zimmer frame are equally hostile to those with pushchairs. An age-friendly city is also often a green city, as it will be highly walkable, has a variety of transport options (not just cars) and will likely be high density, all hallmarks of sustainability.
Moreover, older populations can be an economic and social boost. As life expectancies increase and people work longer, cities that allow older people to work longer will benefit from a ‘silver dividend’, according to a November 2019 Asia Development Bank report. In addition, older people have lower utilisation rates for schools and police, and have an average higher net wealth than younger people. Traditionally, cities have been designed for and by the young and the rich; as the world wakes up to the need to prioritise population health, sustainability and reducing inequality, making Melbourne a place that is liveable at all ages make sense at multiple levels.
Developing a ‘next generation’ ageing agenda
Genuine age-friendly cities are not just about creating more park benches for older people, but building integrated cities that work for people of all ages as well as being good for the economy. Here’s a suggestion for five elements of a new strategy for Melbourne that not only addresses recent failings, but develops new skills and assets that will serve it in tomorrow’s world:
1. Become the most liveable city for people of all ages. Systems change starts with a mindset shift, and the shift we need is about being explicit that being one of the world’s most liveable cities needs to work for all residents, not just the most vocal or connected. Older people, those on low incomes and the most vulnerable need to see that the city works for them. Framing the challenge differently can make an impact as it then leads to questions of what success looks like, and for whom.
Challenge Question: Can Melbourne be the best city in the world to live, whatever age you are? (And how will that be measured?)
2. Adopt a ‘Healthy Habitats’ model to embed health & wellness all around. Health systems around the world are shifting from reactive, acute care models to proactive, chronic care models, and the pandemic hasn’t changed this trend. The key lesson, as clearly laid out in the Blue Zones work, is that health needs to be part of the everyday - people do better when in constant motion, engaging socially and have purpose. A recent presentation I made to US senior living providers lays out a model for Healthy Habitats. This suggests blurring the boundaries between aged care buildings and cities; ensuring plenty of access by older people to city centres, local services (especially public transport) and nature. Local hubs that bring older people together to teach technology and promote social connection are already successful in New York, while new models that provide joined up service hubs for heath and care or create local intergenerational teams to address common challenges are promising.
Challenge Question: Can Melbourne be the place where there’s no need for residents to give up their homes and move into aged care ‘facilities’ at all, but instead stay independent, supported within local, interdependent, thriving communities?
3. Activate the wisdom and contribution of all residents. A city that can leverage its only growing natural resource could have a powerful advantage. Taiwan, which transitioned to a democracy when the Internet was already a thing, has built a variety of digital engagement platforms, for example to visualise where the budget is being spent, to allow anyone to create e-petitions (and require ministries to respond to any that have more than 5,000 signatures), and creating Participation Officers who respond to hashtags (see my panel with Digital Minister Audrey Tang here). Barcelona has the Decidim platform, which serves as a digital suggestion box that can impact legislation. Could Melbourne have a civic engagement effort to capture the needs and preferences of citizens of all ages? And if there are those who we’re not hearing from because of the digital divide, well that’s the first thing that will need to be fixed.
As Humanocracy points out, today’s most innovative organisations create mechanisms to listen to the experts on the front lines, and bring the market inside large organisations to deliver ideas, feedback and scale up new solutions. As national governments have dithered and failed to provide leadership, cities are picking up the mantle of driving the global social and environmental agenda through organisations such as C40.
What better opportunity to engage citizens more formally in a bottom-up exercise about what they want “Melbourne2.0” to look like, and lean in to the innate competitive nature of Aussies to drive sufficient change to ‘win’ the race to a world-beating city model?
Challenge Question: Can Melbourne be the city that most effectively engages and empowers its older residents to stay connected and engaged and create shared purpose?
4. Develop and share metrics of wellness. Interest in ESG investing is growing fast as awareness of climate change and inequality becomes ever more mainstream. According to a study by Morgan Stanley, 84% of millennials have ESG investing as a central goal, while 40% have chosen a job because of its sustainability values. There’s considerable debate about how best to measure the environment or societal impact of firms, yet so far there’s been very little discussion about how to measure age-friendliness in an organisation or city context. Swire Properties has recently produced an impact report about a development in Hong Kong that tracks an area’s vibrancy, resilience, livelihood and wellness, though not ageing specifically. A number of new indices are being created to show the most successful cities to age in (such as AgeFriendly.com and Milken’s Age Forward Cities report), and Melbourne has a number of metrics available here, but the field is wide open for someone to step up and define what success looks like in this area.
Challenge Question: Can Melbourne lead the world in developing a set of non-financial metrics that track the health, wellness and contribution of older people?
5. Build Melbourne into a global 'agetech' hub. There is a growing awareness of the need for innovations for ageing, for example this week’s special report by The Economist on dementia and there are promising startups bringing technology, new ideas and bold ambition into what can be a grey area; accounting firm Bentleys’ CareFactor being one Australian highlight, in addition to the Aging2.0 activities. There’s also growing interest by investors in some countries, though my colleagues tell me that things have gone off the boil in Australia after early interest. What is missing is a committed city or region that is willing to bring the ecosystem together, offering up its infrastructure, services and procurement dollars to scale up novel ideas. Given Melbourne’s strength in academia and biomedical research, funding from wealthy family foundations and a growing impact investing community, together with its recent aged care failings, there is a case to be made for thinking boldly.
Challenge Question: Can Melbourne become the world’s leading innovation hub and local living lab for ageing and longevity?
Baby steps on the road to big ideas
Kevin Rudd has painted a vision of small, pragmatic countries stepping up to collaborate in a post-covid-19 era to shape the new world order. Many of the countries doing the best at dealing with ageing populations - Singapore, Finland, Austria, the Netherlands - are small, tech, forward and also lead the world in liveability.
Lofty ambitions are created by top-down vision and bottom-up momentum. As Cr Capp has proposed, “we don’t want just a “new normal”, we want a “new extraordinary” for Melbourne”. At Aging2.0 we’re taking baby steps in this direction; tomorrow (Tuesday Sept 1st) we’re holding an Aging2.0 Melbourne event on ‘Elevating Caregiving’ with Amica, one of Canada’s leading residential care providers. This event will hopefully start a conversation with a core group about what success looks like and who are the key players to move this agenda forward.
I’m a newcomer to the city - my Melburnian wife and I got married here in February, and we stayed on as our flights got cancelled and Australia became the envy of the world in its handling. A lot has changed since, but from the relatively small vantage point of our 5km radius, I’m excited about thinking that the city could again be the best place in the world, not just for the young but for everybody.