ANN ARBOR—A few years ago, Philippa Clarke and her mother visited York, England, where her mother was born. Her mother wanted to see the ancient part of the city, founded by the Romans in the first century AD on the banks of the River Ouse.

But in order to do that, she had to leave her wheelchair behind. With Clarke’s help, she made it to the top of the city wall, raising her cane in triumph.

Shortly after returning home, her mother was taking a grandson to school. As she was rounding a corner on her motorized scooter, she hit a patch of uneven pavement and fell, breaking a hip. She hasn’t been the same since.

Her mother’s long struggle to function with multiple sclerosis was a major factor in Clarke’s decision to study how the physical environment affects older people with disabilities. And her mother’s accident has strengthened her conviction that disability isn’t solely a result of an individual’s physical condition?it’s a function of the gap between a person’s capabilities and their environment.

Now a researcher at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR), Clarke headed to England again this spring to participate in a scientific study tour designed to foster multinational collaboration on how age-supportive built environments can help to foster the World Health Organization’s vision for age-friendly cities.

Clarke has conducted research with collaborators at Michigan and other U.S. universities that clearly shows a strong link between the prevalence of potholes, broken curbs and cracked sidewalks and mobility problems among older adults. Those people with balance problems and leg weakness who lived on streets in fair or poor condition were over four times as likely as those living on streets in good condition to report a lot of difficulty walking two or three blocks.

With more people on both sides of the pond aging-in-place, governments are grappling with a number of programs and policy initiatives designed to promote livable communities across the lifespan. But the UK and Canadian governments are much further along in this effort than the U.S., Clarke says.

“The UK and Canada have much larger populations of older adults,” she said. “And the UK is a very densely populated country, with 60 million people living in an area smaller than the state of Oregon. As a result, community design has become a critical issue.”

On the study tour, Clarke visited PAMELA (Pedestrian Accessibility and Movement Environment Laboratory), a life-size physical lab in the UK that simulates uneven pavement, traffic noise, and other common environmental conditions, with real people equipped to simulate various impairments, including vision and cognitive difficulties, as well as wheelchair users. “These kinds of labs serve as a test ground for clinical interventions,” Clarke said, “operating as a bridge between the clinical and the real world.”

But it isn’t just the physical facilities and research-driven policy initiatives that account for the gap between age-friendly urban environments in the U.S. and the UK. “In the U.S., there’s the tremendous reliance on the automobile, which presents a major problem when people are older and can no longer drive. Public transportation here in the U.S. is just not that well-established in most places, compared to the U.K.”

In cross-cultural data Clarke has recently analyzed from the U.S. Health & Retirement Study and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, she has found other possible reasons. “Older Americans report a much stronger sense of control than older English people,” she said. “So when things really are out of their control, as happens so often with age, Americans may have a harder time acknowledging that. And you can’t start to solve a problem until you acknowledge that you have one.”

Established in 1949, the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR) is the world’s largest academic social science survey and research organization, and a world leader in developing and applying social science methodology, and in educating researchers and students from around the world. ISR conducts some of the most widely-cited studies in the nation, including the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan Survey of Consumer Attitudes, the American National Election Studies, the Monitoring the Future Study, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Health and Retirement Study, the Columbia County Longitudinal Study and the National Survey of Black Americans. ISR researchers also collaborate with social scientists in more than 60 nations on the World Values Surveys and other projects, and the Institute has established formal ties with universities in Poland, China, and South Africa. ISR is also home to the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the world’s largest digital social science data archive. Visit the ISR Web site at http://www.isr.umich.edu for more information.