This article examines attempts at one life-plan community to involve older residents in mitigating the effects of global warming and environmental degradation, and, drawing upon lessons learned ...during the author's long career in the disability advocacy arena, offers guidance on involving
older people in confronting the threats posed by climate change.
An emerging trend in Canada is the creation of community energy plans, where decisions that used to be left to regional level energy agencies or private individuals are now being considered at the ...community level. A desire to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to become more energy self-sufficient is driving this change. Theoretically, local level management is desirable because it achieves these goals through improvements in the three areas of energy efficiency, energy conservation and switching to renewable energy sources. The analysis of 10 of the first community energy plans in Canadian communities, ranging in population size from 500 to one million, finds that communities are choosing policies and programs centred on increasing energy efficiency and conservation while renewable energy receives much less attention. Municipal operations were called upon to set higher targets than the general community. Communities that recognized the substantial potential of renewable energy often focused on technologies that the municipal sector could implement, such as bio-fuels for their transportation fleet. Wind, passive solar design, solar photovoltaics and solar thermal options were only recommended in a few cases. Overall, only one of the five larger communities (Calgary) recommended implementing multiple renewable energy technologies while three of the five smaller communities proposed multiple renewable energy sources. The implication is that smaller and more remote communities may be the most willing to lead in the planned introduction of renewable energy systems.
Many resources exist to explain financial planning challenges for the average person. But not many discussions focus on individuals or couples who are child-free or childless, often referred to as ...Solo Agers. This article examines the planning areas (financial and non-financial) that
are most important for Solo Agers to focus on to maximize the probability of a life well-lived.
Intelligent voice assistants (IVAs) have the potential to support older adults' independent living. However, despite a growing body of research focusing on IVA use, we know little about why older ...adults become IVA non-users. This paper examines the reasons older adults use, limit, and abandon IVAs (i.e., Amazon Echo) in their homes. We conducted eight focus groups, with 38 older adults residing in a Life Plan Community. Thirty-six participants owned an Echo for at least a year, and two were considering adoption. Over time, most participants became non-users due to their difficulty finding valuable uses, beliefs associated with ability and IVA use, or challenges with use in shared spaces. However, we also found that participants saw the potential for future IVA support. We contribute a better understanding of the reasons older adults do not engage with IVAs and how IVAs might better support aging and independent living in the future.
For many years Chicago's looming large-scale housing projects defined the city, and their demolition and redevelopment—via the Chicago Housing Authority's Plan for Transformation—has been perhaps the ...most startling change in the city's urban landscape in the last twenty years. The Plan, which reflects a broader policy effort to remake public housing in cities across the country, seeks to deconcentrate poverty by transforming high-poverty public housing complexes into mixed-income developments and thereby integrating once- isolated public housing residents into the social and economic fabric of the city. But is the Plan an ambitious example of urban regeneration or a not-so- veiled effort at gentrification?In the most thorough examination of mixed- income public housing redevelopment to date, Robert J. Chaskin and Mark L. Joseph draw on five years of field research, in-depth interviews, and volumes of data to demonstrate that while considerable progress has been made in transforming the complexes physically, the integrationist goals of the policy have not been met. They provide a highly textured investigation into what it takes to design, finance, build, and populate a mixed-income development, and they illuminate the many challenges and limitations of the policy as a solution to urban poverty. Timely and relevant, Chaskin and Joseph's findings raise concerns about the increased privatization of housing for the poor while providing a wide range of recommendations for a better way forward.
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