Editorial Preface: Elderly Mobility

This Special Issue of TeMA Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment collects the proceedings of one of the sessions organised in the framework of the XX Scientific Meeting of the Società Italiana degli Economisti dei Trasporti e della Logistica (SIET), focused on the MOBILAGE (Mobility and aging: daily life and welfare supportive networks at the neighbourhood level) research project financed by Fondazione Cariplo within the “Aging and social research: people, places and relations” 2017 Call for scientific research. The session was addressed to investigate elderly (people aged 65+) mobility, by exploring the supply and demand of Local Public Transport (LPT) in urban areas. The progressive ageing of population, particularly in developed economies (Myles, 2002; Groueff, 2015), is one of the issues that cities have to face nowadays and in the next years, according to the world urban population projections. In fact, improvements in nutrition, sanitation and medical care have increased life expectancy to a level never experienced by previous generations (Oeppen & Vaypel, 2002; Pugliese, 2011). It is estimated that, taking into account the 28 member states, in 2030 the European Union will have more people aged 65-79 years than aged 0-14 years. Moreover, in 20 years, the percentage of people over 80 years old – the so-called “oldest old” – will almost double. In particular, by 2030, Italy is projected to have the second oldest population in the world, after Japan (UN/DESA, 2015). In addition to an increasingly older population, Italy has a total fertility rate of 1.39 children per woman, considerably below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. Despite being recognized as a crucial issue of urban policies (OECD, 2015) and a central axis of investigation since it encompasses different dimensions of urban life, there is still limited knowledge regarding the relationship between the (physical and functional) organization of urban systems and how older people experience the city (Smith 2009; Altunkas et al., 2017). Studies related to the improvement of urban accessibility to open and built spaces and to activities of interest for elderly seem not to catch the attention of the scientific debate, compared to the other lines of research mainly focused on the benefits of an active ageing in terms of health and mobility options. In particular, mobility promotes healthy ageing by providing opportunities for physical activity and movement whereas sedentary lifestyles, particularly at older age, increase many of the risks commonly associated with ageing (Masoumi & Shayegan, 2016; McPhee et al., 2016), thus increasing the healthcare expenditure.