WHO Age Friendly Cities and Communities: The Korean experience

Abstract

In 2010, the World Health Organization (WHO) created the WHO Global Network of Age-Friendly Cities and Communities, a global network of cities that are committed to using the WHO guidelines to make their community more age-friendly. For the last seven years, the Network has grown to include 380 cities in 37 countries; however, little has been known about how the guidelines have been adopted and implemented in Asian countries given that the majority of cities and communities in the Network are in the Western world. This study aims to explore the social, political, and cultural forces that have led the cities in South Korea, the fastest aging country and also one of few developed countries in Asia, to join the Network. A series of interviews with stakeholders such as the public administrators of the four cities in the Network—Seoul, Jeongeup, Suwon, and Busan—have been conducted and subjected to a content analysis in January/February 2017. The primary findings are threefold: (1) Among the three factors analyzed, political motivation held the greatest sway; (2) the driving force behind the political motivations took several forms, from election year platforms to a new local government department needing to find work projects for itself; (3) Finally, implementation patterns showed great variability between the metropolitan cities and the self-governing cities. This study contributes to closing the knowledge gap in age-friendly initiatives in Asia, and future research needs to compare factors affecting the participation in the Network between countries within and across continents.