Bridging the Gap: Accessibility for Aging and Disability in Planning

The overlap in planning requirements for older adults and people with disabilities creates strong potential for collaboration. A centrally shared challenge is inaccessibility in the built environment. Despite overlapping theory and design principles, there is a gap in policy, practice, and research that jointly explore accessibility issues for both groups. This may be partly because each group’s needs have been overlooked in the planning process. In this piece, we address these gaps by describing the accessibility challenges both groups face in transportation, housing, and overall planning processes, and by charting directions for strategic integration based on an anti-ableist framework.