Tag: Social Development and Poverty

Rethinking urban design necessary to ensure sustainable, healthy and age-friendly urban communities.

The last 40 years have seen soaring urbanization in the PRC, as a result of which 60 percent of its population now lives in urban areas. the PRC’s society is also aging rapidly. As these two trends are ongoing, the PRC needs to make its cities more livable, healthy and age-friendly, as well as environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive.

Contemporary urban life in the PRC and elsewhere has seen increased individuality with reduced social cohesion, smaller families, fewer children and many people living alone. This requires reconsideration and improvement of the social security and pension systems and health and elderly care services. But city design and urban management also have roles to play in addressing these issues by promoting social cohesion and restoring community life.

For example, the PRC could promote healthier and more age-friendly cities with cohesive neighborhoods if it rethinks and rehabilitates its system of compounds. The rehabilitation of urban compounds in the PRC will need to be a comprehensive and participatory effort to promote improved health, safety, resilience and an active community life.

This means reducing the number of fences and gates and introducing new pathways for pedestrians and bicycles through compounds to create a finer mesh of pedestrian and bicycle networks. In the process, walking distances would be significantly shortened. Also, new small buildings with two to four stories can be introduced, as careful in-fill development between residential high-rise buildings, with community spaces, small shops and other uses.

All these will create a more humane environment amid the typical wide roads and tall buildings, as well as create well-defined spaces that are either public or semi-public for local residents, or private for individual households.

If Chinese cities and urban spaces can be made less dependent on cars, this would bring healthier lifestyles to the residents and enable more interaction within communities. That would be good news for everybody, especially the elderly and children.

One out of every five people will be aged over 60 in the PRC by 2030, heralding a “super-aged society”; and it will rise to more than one in three by 2050. Many of these elderly will age further, becoming part of an emerging four-generation urban society. It is a trend observed not only in the PRC but in many other countries, especially high-income ones. The pressures of an aging society and inaccessible urban environments affect women disproportionally due to their longer life expectancy and care duties.

Recognizing this, urban planners could consider a number of internationally recognized best practices for sustainable urban development. These include the “compact city” concept, in which an urban area is organized in clusters of pedestrian-friendly, high-density mixed-use centers within walking distance of public transport stations, inclusive of green open space. This is known as transit-oriented development.

Other practices are low-carbon development, to which compact cities contribute, and climate-resilient urban development. In this, green infrastructure and parks are combined with gray infrastructure to provide flood and drought risk management, air quality and microclimate improvements, habitat for a diversity of plant and animal species, and green amenities for urban residents.

The overall objective must be to make cities liveable and socially inclusive. This includes not only environmentally sustainable planning but ensuring access to affordable and social housing and to public services, education, health and attractive jobs. Integrating health and aging into sustainable urban environment improvement and city planning and urban design will bring together many agencies and specialists to work across sectors and disciplines.

While these good principles create many benefits, it is important to adapt health-and age-specific features into cities and new urban developments, buildings, infrastructure and open spaces. This will be vital for urban competitiveness and will influence individuals’ and companies’ decisions to remain in a certain city or relocate to another.

Making cities healthier and more friendly to the elderly and children requires well-planned urban green spaces, safe, clean and walkable urban environments, and accessible services and facilities for these groups. Women who tend to live longer than men will in particular benefit from these improvements. All of these will help ease public health management in an era when infectious diseases such as the COVID-19 pandemic, noncommunicable diseases and the challenges of aging populations are converging.

Cities also need to combine an age-friendly public transport system with safe and convenient sidewalks and pathways, bicycle parking, parks, public spaces and public service facilities. This effort needs to be integrated with universal urban design to ensure that public spaces, sidewalks, parks, and buildings are accessible for people of all ages and the physically impaired.

Prioritizing health and age-inclusion will not only become the driver and platform for action to address the many challenges of the emerging four-generation cities, but is also a great opportunity to transform urban community life for the better.

Neighborhoods, if designed well, would encourage all residents to contribute to the care of children and the elderly, just by being part of a highly interactive local community.

Urban rehabilitation and retrofitting would reduce carbon emissions as people walk more, and contribute to the country’s objective of peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and reaching carbon neutrality before 2060.

If these principles of urban rehabilitation are applied, local social cohesion and wellbeing in the PRC’s cities will also improve. Urban health and age-inclusive designs will also contribute to the Healthy the PRC 2030 Plan and more generally promote well-being and high-quality development, an overarching objective of the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25).

The population in the PRC is aging rapidly. The proportion of people aged 60 or above is expected to increase to 35 percent by 2050, turning the population into one of the oldest in the world. While aging poses great challenges, if managed well, these can be overcome to create opportunities.

Reforms for fostering labor mobility and upgrading human capital will reduce the labor shortages stemming from an aging population. Greater public and private investments to strengthen elderly care services and facilities will create employment opportunities and improve people’s well-being.

Benefits of greater labor mobility

Mobility restrictions in the PRC－the household registration system (hukou) and inability of migrants to claim social security benefits away from home－discourage transfers from provinces where there is a surplus of labor to ones where there is a deficit. Re-allocating labor from low- to high-productivity sectors could add several percentage points to GDP growth. And accelerating the ongoing relaxation of the hukou policy and social security reforms for migrant workers to gain access to social services and benefits in their place of residency will remove such institutional mobility barriers.

The benefits of greater mobility can be maximized through increased investments in human capital. Gross enrollment rate in the PRC’s senior high schools and the percentage of population with tertiary education in scientific and technical subjects need to increase. The growing digitalization of the economy adds pressure to the task.

While new learning methods should encourage lifelong learning, creativity, innovation, and problem-solving skills, incentives must be introduced for companies to provide on-the-job training, and initiatives to re-train workers whose skills are obsolete to prolong their participation in the labor force.

Increasing female participation in the labor market will also help maintain the labor supply. Although gender gaps in education have largely closed, female workforce participation has declined over the past decade, and women continue to bear a disproportionate responsibility for unpaid care work at home and remain under-represented in scientific research and high-technology industries and services. Policies for equal employment opportunities, increased maternity leave, improved support for childcare, elderly care, and single mothers, are essential to attract and maintain women in the labor force.

Better services and care for the elderly

Under the PRC’s 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25), development of an efficient long-term care (LTC) system is a government priority. Insufficient elderly care facilities result in unnecessary admissions in acute care hospitals and are a waste of healthcare resources. Improved home- and community-based LTC can address this issue. Incentives to develop home- and community-based services, such as home help, home care, and home nursing services, and center-based services to support the elderly are critical to meet the”90-7-3 older persons care pattern “launched during the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15) period in which 90 percent of the elderly population should receive home-based care, 7 percent community-based care, and 3 percent institutional care.

More affordable elderly residential care for lower-income households that need assistance is part of the solution. These facilities can be funded by a mix of government support, individual pension contributions, and private sector involvement. This approach is emerging in the PRC but needs to be strengthened. These efforts will benefit from a shift in the role of the government from supplier to regulator for the provision of LTC. Examples of government tasks include setting policies and standards, subsidizing people who cannot afford the private facilities, and incentivizing private sector participation, which can engage in effective models of public-private partnerships.

Incentives and policies need to be improved

At the same time, incentives and policies to retain and train LTC givers must improve. Professions crucial to a well-functioning elderly care system, including nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, nutritionists, medical specialists (that is, neurologists, specialists in geriatrics), social workers, service providers, and managers must expand. The number of professionals in paramedical, medical, social work and elderly care management should also increase, as those will result in better care and improved services for the elderly, as well as significant employment opportunities.

Addressing the needs of an aging society is costly. Public healthcare expenditure in the PRC stands at 2.9 percent of GDP compared with the 6.5 percent average in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, where LTC alone amounts to 1.7 percent of GDP. the PRC has made significant progress in extending health insurance coverage universally, but out-of-pocket payments still account for about half of the total health expenditure, exacerbating the vulnerability of lower-income households. Expanding health insurance coverage, reducing co-insurance rates, and introducing ceilings on maximum out-of-pocket payments are reforms that have proven effective in other countries.

Increased funding should not threaten fiscal sustainability. A more progressive taxation system, the further liberalization of energy and resource prices, and the introduction of environmental and property taxes would increase social spending without straining public finances. Policy reforms, too, can help. Affordable social services, higher pensions, and support to women through subsidies for childcare, baby bonuses, child grants, flexible hours, or part-time work, are key to lift fertility rates mitigating the impacts of an aging society.

While gradual increases in retirement age will strengthen labor supply and support the sustainability of the pension system, which is crucial for the success of a multigenerational workforce, age-friendly policies, such as more flexible work options, retraining, re-skilling, and age-friendly workplaces are important during the transition. Finally, the sustainability of the pension system is critical in an aging society. For that, the introduction of voluntary private pension funds, currently piloted in Zhejiang and Chongqing, needs to progress faster.