Project Report: Population Aging and Longevity in World Cities

Improvements in health care and declining birth rates have combined to create rapidly aging populations throughout the industrialized world. By 2020, for example, nearly seventeen percent of the US population is expected to be over the age of sixty-five. In Japan that mark has already been passed, with more than one-quarter of the population expected to be over sixty-five by 2020. At the same time, the world's population is increasingly concentrated in urban areas: the United Nations estimates that by 2025, sixty-one percent of the world's population will live in cities. As both urbanization and population aging increase, we will need models of how to accommodate this population shift and examples to emulate in dealing with these phenomena.