Agnieszka Labus had the opportunity to participate in the “City of Longevity” conference organized by the UK National Innovation Centre for Ageing operating at Newcastle University, which took place in early July. It was a place where leaders and experts from all over the world gathered, dealing with the topic of shaping a city that supports us to live long and independent lives at every stage!

An ideal opportunity to receive a huge dose of knowledge, good practices in a great atmosphere of people who have a mission, clear goals and are implementing actions in cities such as Bergamo, Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires,Barcelona and others, basing urban decisions on open data, identifying people’s changing lifestyles using modern technologies.

Many models of policy and project implementation, often fail to keep up with today’s social, technological, economic and environmental changes – we need to start changing the mindset to – NOT segmentation of policies but big picture integration through the lens of longevity, which encompasses everything we need for quality, healthy, independent living with respect for our Planet’s resources!

Many interesting lectures from The World Bank through research by scientists and experts in many fields in the area of longevity.

And the example from Tel Aviv was quite a surprise – officials decided to go out to include people in the activities. Since people are reluctant to take part in public consultations they decided to go out “in trucks” to residents by creating mobile consultation points and once a month at the office in the hallway lobby organizing yoga and dancing for those interested (mostly elderly residents who don’t use online consultations), showing people the friendliness of the institutional nature of the city office, while observing and collecting data, statistics – isn’t this called going “out of the ageing”!oing “out of the ageing”!