Intergenerational Change: Empowered Elders
Ecology of Interventions
This is the last post in our five-part series on our wicked problem: the isolation of the elderly in the Greater Pittsburgh area. For part one, we parsed the intersecting points of multiple thorny issues and their distinct set of complexities; all of which shape the experiences of the elderly. For part two, we identified key stakeholders by creating high-level and low-level stakeholder maps. The high-level map outlined the actors that reside in this problem space or ecosystem; the low-level map stated the potential points of conflict and affinity between three stakeholders. For part three, we created a Multi-Level Perspective map that exhaustively outlined major historical events that informed the development of the issue and its manifestations in contemporary society. For part four, we articulated a vision for 2075 from the perspective of elders in the Pittsburgh area in which individualism is reduced or non-existent. With the vivid illustration of a wildly different future from a particular lens, we speculated what the milestones may be across time scales.
In this final post, we proposed material as well as unmaterial interventions across different systemic levels and of different types. With a focus on themes including culture, advocacy, and infrastructure, these interventions together contribute to building an inclusive, accessible, and diverse elders’ community.
Elders in Pittsburgh encompass approximately 25% of the population, and of that percentage, 13.8% are 65 and older (Age-Friendly Greater Pittsburgh, 2017). In a more recent survey conducted by AARP, research has found that the 65 years and older group has grown to be roughly 20% of the Pittsburgh population. The elderly population in Pittsburgh is assumed to reach its peak around 2030 (Southwestern Pennsylvania Partnership for Aging, 2021, University of Pittsburgh, 2014). This trend demands the city to undergo transformation to build and foster more elderly-friendly communities and environments.
We address several issues that were raised in our MLP mapping, particularly the genesis and evolution of these three subject matters — Anglo-centric Christianity, Age-ism, and Able-ism. These three, individually and together, had a compounding effect on the natural and complex aging processes for elders in the greater Pittsburgh area. Through the MLP mapping, we peeled back the layers to then understand how to make a vision real.
In our ecology of interventions, we propose a first step to how the vision of a thriving intergenerational culture can become real. This is encompassed by touching on culture, infrastructure, and advocacy proposing multiple dimensions, scales, and particularities to designing transitions for an equitable and sustainable future for isolated elders in the Pittsburgh area.
Process & Approach
Our process consisted of four key steps:
- Individual Reflections: Each team member sketched their reflections onto an intervention matrix and drafted relevant narratives to their initial ecology of interventions
- Synthesis & Insights: As a team, we integrated our intervention matrices and found that the interventions centered on two main themes — independence and elasticity with a focus on the ecology of care and political decision making
- Narrative Building: We then categorized our interventions into three categories: culture, advocacy, and infrastructure. Culture focuses on integrating the elders into the community by means such as bottom-up budget proposal plans. Infrastructure focuses on improved urban planning to increase accessibility. Advocacy focuses on proactively working to create positive environments and services for the elderly in multiple spaces; this theme has two sub-themes that further specify these efforts. They are policy-making and services.
- Alignment & Focus: Finally, we measured these shifts and changes in our ecology of interventions against the guiding principles we developed through our visioning process. They are care, choice, collective thinking, and elasticity.
How to Read Our Ecology
Our map follows the template used for our vision, seen in assignment four.
This map is prism-shaped with each systemic level outlined and each intervention in its appropriate level. The leftmost block shows the household scale and the rightmost block shows the planet-scale. Connections between interventions are indicated across scales with the gray-colored lines and text boxes. Additionally, each intervention is outlined with a particular color; the color of the outlines indicates the category each falls under: environment, infrastructure/technology, political/legal, economic/business, and social.
Ecology of Interventions
Culture, Advocacy, and Infrastructure were the core principles of our proposed interventions. These principles were established to ensure that our interventions could provide the elderly with options and remove barriers that the elderly face to ultimately support their independence and give them a voice.
Culture
When looking at cultural interventions, we used the themes of independence and elasticity from our guiding principles from the future vision we created. Our team wanted to establish a bottom-up approach, and Intergenerational councils and diverse groups including the elderly can contribute to deciding how cities distribute their budgeting and take part in the implementation process.
Infrastructure
Through our research of this wicked problem, we found a tight correlation between the natural environment and the health and well-being of the elderly population. Within our ecology of interventions, we propose a green and blue space creation and restoration program to assist in increasing the number of spaces that the elderly can access. Alongside increasing the number of access points to the natural environment, we wanted to implement an intervention that assisted in increasing accessibility to blue and green spaces. Through the implementation of urban restoration laws, the elderly will have access to such spaces. Previously unfriendly infrastructures, like inaccessible sidewalks, will no longer be added barrier to the elderly‘s ability to become independent.
Advocacy
Our ultimate goal is to empower the elderly by cultivating social advocacy for independence, no matter what age. Our interventions fall under the categories of policy and services.
We created a City-level intervention and National-level intervention to tackle political advocacy from both a regime and niche level. Urban Restoration Laws at a national level would assist in establishing sidewalks as an important mode of transportation and shape the way we advocate for all people with disabilities who currently see sidewalks as a factor in how they are isolated. Urban Restoration laws present a top-down intervention to empower the elderly population. Intergenerational councils at a city level provide a bottom-up approach to providing a voice to the older population. By diversifying city councils, we have the opportunity to hear voices of different perspectives as well as provide a way for the elderly to be included in the city budgeting and implementation processes.
At the State-level and National-level, we created two interventions to assist in service advocacy. On the national level, increasing accessible housing by creating and retro-fitting the physical structure with accessible entryways allows for people of all abilities to access the built world around them. Increasing accessible housing or housing designed specifically for elders provides the elderly population with choices that they may not currently have. At a State-level, we propose increasing university-level classes that are tailored for the personal and professional development of the older population. With education being focused on the first 18–20 years of someone’s life, there are few educational opportunities for anyone outside of that age range. Increasing university-level classes that are tailored to an older student would not only assist in increasing opportunities that the elderly may have but also initiates a change in the way we see education.
Connections Between Interventions
Our ecology of interventions can be understood through the categorization we developed to show distinction, scale, and systemic levels in our approach. It allows the reader to gain a holistic understanding of the networked interventions while also obtaining insight into the parts that make up the whole.
The threads that connect each intervention encompassing the whole are four key lines of connection: decision-making, legislation, services, and the built environment. Each articulate both a precise need and vision to address those needs for the betterment of the lives of elders in the greater Pittsburgh area.
The four threads are as follows:
Decision-making:
The Intergenerational Council addresses the elders’ desire to have a larger say in what presently takes place and may take shape in the future. In addition to decision making capacities, elders are placed at the heart of an engine — city budgeting processes and bureaucracy — that fosters a collective psyche. The presence and proactive engagement of elders in the process of city-budgeting, developing and implementing, profoundly shift how the Pittsburgh community thinks of their elders. This addresses culture, infrastructure, and advocacy.
Legislation:
The Urban Restoration Laws enable a tremendous amount of change to take place, specifically in relation to the making of affordable housing much more readily available to the elderly community across socioeconomic lines. This implementation and enactment of this law would cement a pragmatic need that many were not privy to. This addresses infrastructure and advocacy.
Services:
University-level classes and affordable housing deeply connect with the Intergenerational Council and the Urban Restoration Laws. Such services work on-the-ground and enable elders to live more dignified lives regardless of background. However, these services are typically contingent on funding models, public support, and legislation. All of which we address through this network. This addresses infrastructure and advocacy.
Built environment:
Green and blue spaces dovetailed with restoration programs are intertwined with the Intergenerational Council and the Urban Restoration Laws. Funding and legislation profoundly shape the landscape of a region and, ultimately, its topography, which impacts whether an elder can walk down the street, access the crosswalk, and safely visit their neighbor. These seemingly mundane acts can easily be hindered with a poor or mishandled built environment; all of which we considered and incorporated into our ecology of interventions. This addresses infrastructure and advocacy.
It can be argued that all aspects of our interventions have a running theme of advocating for the elderly community, even merely by existing. We, however, strengthen their utility, concepts, and potential through the thoughtful, interconnected ecology of interventions that are articulated here.
Reflections
Our insights from this assignment include reflective questions, insights, and gaps that were identified.
Reflective questions:
- How does one identify the edge of an ecology of interventions? In that, when do we know when to stop strategizing and begin enacting?
- How can we account for multiple and complexly layered connections that thread together the interventions?
- How can we work across scales and with multiple stakeholders to enact positive change?
- At what point would scale become a hindrance, and when can we apply bespoke processes?
Insights
MLP + Milestones:
Identifying the three key historic events from the Multi-Level Perspective map allowed us to tie together historical foundings of an issue to the development of milestones. These were not necessarily in response to solely historical ills or present manifestations of such disparities; they wove together a deeper story that reflected understanding a wicked problem and its greater context across time scales–both forward and backward. This foundation allowed us to think deeply about the development of an ecology of interventions.
Guiding Principles:
The guiding principles that naturally emerged through this process allowed us to have a north star. If we had not developed these, crafting an ecology of interventions, albeit hypothetical, would have been a daunting task. However, the principles guided the milestoning and ideation processes equally with focus and creativity.
Change Across Systemic Levels:
Through the matrix provided by the Transition Design course, we were able to think across multiple horizons and scales. Had we not been equipped with this tool, crafting an ecology of interventions would have been, not only daunting, but much messier than needed. The template allowed us to thoughtfully think through individual interventions and more so, the connections across them as a driving force.
Missing Pieces
Power:
Identifying dynamics of power and power asymmetries are absent from this process. Though the stakeholder mapping exercise allows for some of this to surface, naturally or intentionally, understanding dynamics and asymmetries of power may be important for a thorough assessment of each intervention along with an ecology of interventions. This may indicate what is truly a lever and when might be a time to pull that lever; amongst other strategies.
Integration of Multi-stakeholder Engagement:
With crafting an ecology of interventions, similar to power, it will be interesting to see how one can map multi-stakeholder engagements for each intervention. Developing strategies and blueprints for how interventions move forward may require a deep understanding of relationships, histories, and dynamics amongst key stakeholders of a given place.
Levers within leverage points:
Another aspect that may warrant exploration is the identification of micro-levers within identified leverage points. The complexity of these wicked issues seem to underscore or infer a multitude of possibilities contingent on relationships, time, resources, and politics. A way to highlight multiple approaches to instigating systemic change may be an interesting additional layer.
Conclusion
The wicked problem of the isolation of elders in the greater Pittsburgh area genuinely illustrates what is defined as a wicked problem. The parsing of this issue revealed multiple layers that were deeply correlated with one another and found in this thin overlay. Its influence on the greater Pittsburgh community left us dumbfounded proving the importance of the Transition Design process.
The opportunity to delve deeply into this issue by applying the Transition Design method allowed us to engage with the issue from multiple perspectives and angles, yet not only in the abstract. The tools provided allowed us to thoughtfully and strategically think through the complex layers that made up the issue. In a similar vein, the tools provided us with a jumping-off point for further creative development–one appropriate to our wicked problem.
The ecology of interventions we present reveals one way to approach a facet of this wicked problem. There were several other perspectives and approaches we considered prior to sharing what’s presented above. Moreover, we believe that tackling culture, infrastructure, and the built environment foreground the guiding principles we developed allowing us (and potentially others) to remain focused while thinking systemically. We believe that we build a strong scaffolding for others to build upon and/or iterative entirely–a strong foundation for thoughtful, careful growth and fertile grounds for deep collaboration.
This post was collaboratively written by Esther Kang, Isabel Ngan, & Yu Jiang
