Collaborative Urban Planning Capacity to Respond to Issues of Urban Elderly

With the growth of living facilities and citizen’s health protection, every year, the share of the elderly from the population of cities is increasing. This increase in share contributes to new challenges facing urban management. The elderly, due to their specific psychological and physical characteristics, are not able to use some of the facilities in the cities, and on the other hand have special needs that have been neglected in the traditional urban development plans. Urban management should always be responsive to the needs of citizens, and especially to vulnerable target groups. In fact, in a desirable platform, urban management in addition to justice in the provision of services (aimed at the general public) should have a kind of "positive discrimination" in the city's atmosphere. On a global level, collaborative planning as a new paradigm of urban planning that aims to address the issue of "democracy in urban planning" by empowering citizens to formulate, approve, and ultimately implement development proposals, in many upstream domains planning has been used. The present paper, by explaining the capacity of this urban planning paradigm responding to the citizenship issue, suggests that using collaborative planning at the level of local urban development plans, can prevent repeating the failure of traditional, comprehensive planning against the aging issue. And thereby improve the quality of life of the elderly as a vulnerable social group.