The significance of the socio-spatial environment for ‘ageing well’ is encapsulated in a growing number of planning-oriented agendas for ‘age-friendly’ cities and communities. Such programmatic frameworks and urban planning strategies revolve around questions of how to create ‘healthy ageing’ environments, foster ‘caring’ neighbourhoods, provide social infrastructures that enable people to remain active, independent and socially connected, or support ‘ageing in place’. The growing recognition of the need to design and plan for ageing populations also applies to the city of Vienna (Austria), which is the empirical case of this research. But who are ‘the elderly’? The picture of older people is powerfully shaped by different age stereotypes and images of ageing: The ideal of the ‘active ager’ to the image of the deficient and frail very old dominate public discourse. Because planning provides important mechanisms for regulation, control and oppression, exercised at different scales and in different settings, it fundamentally affects social relations in space. This conference contribution aims to discuss which discursive framings of old age are inscribed in and articulated through urban development programmes. It seeks to explore the powerful role of planning and urban design in shaping society’s perception of later life. It is argued that although older people are increasingly being addressed as a specific ‘target group’ in urban development, cities are still mainly designed and built according to the norm of middle-aged adults. Such planning renders older people as ‘others’ who deviate from the ‘normal’ stage of life and therefore fails to meet its demands for inclusion.