Can housing help people feel more part of their community?

Descriptive transcript

My name is Philippa Carnemolla. I'm a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building at the University of Technology Sydney.

My expertise is really in examining how the built environment impacts the experiences of people, particularly people with disability and older people who are receiving community care.

So I investigate the impact of inclusive housing – that is, the design of the housing, the location of the housing, and how it influences people's independence, autonomy, and their community participation.

Achieve Australia is a large not-for-profit, and our passion is social inclusion for people with disability.

We worked with a developer to build this beautiful set of apartments, where the whole idea is that it actually enables people with disability to be included in a regular community.

One of the most important things about this project is that it enables us to capture the experiences of people with intellectual disability from their perspective.

How do they experience the built environment – the houses where they live, the communities where they live?

I'm here to see Lucy. Lucy lives at Crowle Estate and she is a participant in the research that I'm doing on supported accommodation, finding out people's experiences of living in their own apartment and receiving support.

I had the opportunity to meet over 25 people who live here and who receive support. In particular, we do some tours of people's apartments and they'd speak about the design, what they do, what they enjoy doing, and what they don't like about aspects within the built environment.

[Philippa, off camera] How long have you lived here for?

[Lucy] I've been living here about four years and a half.

[Philippa] What are some of the things you love about living here?

[Lucy] The dogs.

[Philippa] Oh yeah, the dogs. Are there any cafes you like to go to?

[Lucy] I really like to go to all the cafes.

[Philippa] And what do you have?

[Lucy] Hot chocolate.

It's about capturing the stories people hear and weaving those stories together to get a holistic understanding of what it means to live in your own apartment and to receive support.

And how you can maximise community participation, because what we find is that time and time again, placing people in community doesn't mean that people feel a part of that community.

It's been incredibly valuable for us to actually have information about the areas that we can improve, and we continue to ask those questions.

And Philippa continues to have a relationship with the people here and reflect back to us what their experience is.

Traditionally, people who live with an intellectual disability and receive 24-hour support have really only had one choice, and that's living in a group home.

This model is an alternative – it's where people live with one other person or on their own in their own apartment, and still receive 24-hour support without staff sleeping over in their apartment.

What I found was that this totally changed people's sense of ownership of place.

This was their apartment and theirs only.

It's their home.

We want people to live really good lives, and that's important for us to actually understand what that means.

And having an independent person like Philippa as a researcher come in and help us understand that has been so critical for us.

What I really hope for is that the research that I'm building, that body of knowledge, will contribute to how our cities are designed.

So starting from the spaces where we live and moving out to our public spaces, and even considering our cities – designing for autonomy, independence and quality of life.

[Lucy] I'm safe.