The City of Stuttgart has long since taken various measures to meet the demographic challenges of an ageing population. In the social and care sector in particular, there is a wide range of residential care facilities and nursing homes, outpatient support structures, civic initiatives and municipal advisory services. Municipal programs for the age-appropriate conversion of housing supplement these offerings.

In addition, the concept of “participatory age planning” introduced in 2010 promotes the participation and networking of all relevant stakeholders. Since then, these principles have formed the basis for further municipal initiatives such as the “Aging Survey 2012”, the 2nd Stuttgart Poverty Conference “Poor and Old” in 2013 and the Stuttgart “Municipal Care Conference” (2021/2022).

Active ageing, however, requires more than social and care services. Therefore, Stuttgart has implemented age-friendly measures in the areas of mobility, inclusion and participation. These include intergenerational meeting places and a pedestrian traffic concept that was introduced in 2017. Stuttgart is also currently working on an initiative to reduce loneliness across all generations.

As a response to demographic changes, Stuttgart wants to become an even more age-friendly city by joining the WHO Global Network. For this purpose, we will initiate a cross-sectional participation process in which we assess the city’s age-friendliness, identify the needs of older people, develop an action plan, and interlink existing offerings. The city will form a broad urban alliance involving all departments of the city administration, political actors, social partners, foundations and older people. These stakeholders will be members of the municipal steering group “Age-friendly City”, which will help to coordinate the process.

The characteristics of age-friendly cities as defined by the WHO provide an important orientation framework for this participation process, which will start in one district. We will carefully analyze and review the results and their transferability to other districts, developing and using specific indicators and evaluation concepts to continually measure age-friendliness.