Abstract

DUQUE, Marília  and  OLIVEIRA, Adriana Lima de. The Accidental “Age-Friendly City”: Public Expectation and Subjective Experience in São Paulo. RLEC/LJCS [online]. 2022, vol.9, n.1, pp.67-86.  Epub May 01, 2023. ISSN 2184-0458.  https://doi.org/10.21814/rlec.3649.

Two optimisation projects, globally promoted, aim to respond to the challenges of contemporary urban life. The first one is Smart Cities, structured from a technological and informa tional apparatus that aims to make the city more efficient. The second one is Age-Friendly Cities, conceived to adapt urban environments to enable active ageing. Both projects are shaped in the neoliberal system as emancipatory proposals to empower citizens for participatory citizenship in the city. This article proposes that smart cities demand new skills for active ageing, causing challenges for age-friendly cities regarding digital inclusion and digital literacy. Bringing this dis cussion into the Brazilian context, we propose that for the elderly, none of these projects is wholly carried out. However, from an ethnographic perspective, we have mapped how a group of older adults in São Paulo builds their own informational network (centred on WhatsApp), enabling participatory and belonging instances from a perspective that comes “from below”. From this mismatch between urban projects and experience, we point to the emergence of an accidental city that is informally smart and age-friendly.

Keywords : smart cities; active ageing; digital divide; citizenship; accidental city.

        · abstract in Portuguese     · text in English | Portuguese     · English ( pdf ) | Portuguese ( pdf )