Stephen Johnston's blog
Image: A library in Sydney, Australia. Nov 2019. Photo credit: Scott David. A few weeks ago I met Susan Nash, a former Fellow at Stanford’s Distinguished Careers Institute, who is now helping San Jose develop their age-friendly strategy. During our wide=ranging conversation she said something that stuck with me, “an age-friendly city is also a […]
Could a new silver bond finance cross-cutting local projects that are needed to help communities build and scale age-friendly initiatives? Blue bonds, green bonds… The World Bank has recently financed a ‘Blue Bond‘ that aims to fund improvements in fisheries. It’s an evolution of a green bond, and is described as “an innovative financial instrument […]
How would we go about harnessing the collective intelligence of hundreds of cities, thousands of organizations, tens of thousands of entrepreneurs, policy-makers, researchers, and millions of individuals and their families to address a significant global challenge? And how indeed, if the topic was aging? Aging has traditionally not been an area where you would look […]
Could we elevate the ubiquitous swipe to improve our cities? Every day millions of people, young and old, collectively make 1.6bn swipes on profiles they’re presented with on Tinder, one of the most popular dating apps. These swipes either send that profile to the virtual dustbin (left) or open up the potential for witty banter, […]
As cities take on disruptive challenges, in particular harnessing technological disruptions and managing aging populations (see earlier post about updating ‘age-friendly’ here), this note suggests a five-stage framework to guide cities along their innovation journey. It’s designed to be more descriptive than prescriptive – each city will implement in its own way and in line with […]