Active Ageing and Age-Friendly Cities—A Personal Account

Abstract

In this chapter, we invite the reader to follow Alexandre Kalache in his personal travel between public health and public action, academic research and international organizations. Through these moves, we have an original longitudinal "inside view" of a key figure in the international development of Age-Friendly Cities who has been particularly active at the World Health Organization; this view permits to understand the relations between the "social" and the "health" inside the organization through the links between "healthy aging" and "active aging". Clearly, what is presented here as "A personal account", is not a complaisant or uncritical biography. It is probably a key element to illustrate the hypothesis of "intermediaries of active aging", that are people or processes organized to connect ideas and practices, to "interest" various stakeholders. Last but not least, by reconnecting this chapter with the forth one, we also have some arguments to push the idea of an "epistemic community" where the conceptions and the roles of ideas and practices beyond age-friendly cities and communities (AFCC) may differ but still progress in a similar direction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)