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Understanding how the design of urban infrastructure influences the independence and autonomy of people with intellectual disability has far-reaching implications for community inclusion and participation. This article explores how urban design elements of an apartment complex influence how a person with an intellectual disability receives support and participates in the wider community. The study reports on the post-occupancy evaluation of an Australian development of over 400 apartments in Sydney, where 25 people with intellectual disability received 24-hour support. Fifty-three interviews were conducted with people with intellectual disability, their families, and disability support staff. Participants with intellectual disability described what living in their new apartment was like and appreciated the outdoor gardens. However, they also explained that wayfinding was more difficult than in their previous homes—all free-standing group homes. Disability support staff discussed how providing community care for people with intellectual disability in an apartment differed from a suburban free-standing house. Findings were translated into design suggestions for improving service provision to people with disability through the urban design around multi-tower sites of mixed-tenure apartments. The article concludes with recommendations for urban design features to support safe, efficient, and quality care in a high-density urban setting. When viewed through a lens of social infrastructure, the results show how urban design has the potential to influence the collective independence and provision of care to diverse communities in urban centres and cities and is relevant to people with disability, older people, and other community groups who rely on community-care support to remain living independently at home.

Increasing demand for care services in the home has resulted in care systems under pressure operating within stressed government health budgets. This thesis explores an alternative approach to care provision and investigates how improving Australia's housing, through a program of home modifications, substitutes for care while also influencing quality of life. Using a mixed-methods research design with three phases, the study included 157 participants (average age 72 years). All participants were older or living with a disability and all were recent recipients of home modifications. Quality of life scores and informal and formal care hours were compared for before and after home modifications to analyse how the participants were affected by the home modifications. The second phase of the study was qualitative, and served the purpose of supporting and elaborating upon the quantitative results. The third phase integrated these two sets of results. The theoretical framework for this study is founded on the principles of the human/activity/space model, which provided a way of mapping the fundamental interactions occurring between environment and person following a home modification. The results of the quantitative phase revealed that the home modification was associated with an average 42% reduction in care-giving hours (both formal and informal) and an average 40% increase in health-related quality of life levels. The qualitative phase revealed that participants associated home modifications across six effect themes: increased safety and confidence, improved mobility at home, increased independence, supported care-giving role, increased social participation and ability to return home from hospital. Phase three, the integration of the qualitative and quantitative results, further strengthens the evidence for how and why home modifications reduce or replace care-giving. The study found that home modifications not only support care-giving but substitute for it, and suggests a relationship between home modification ...

The presented dataset relates to a research project titled "My Home My Community" undertaken at University of Technology Sydney (UTS) which has been funded by the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) Australia. The dataset reports estimated prevalence rates of Intellectual Disability in NSW by local government area (LGA) from 2010 – 2015. The dataset is a re-examination of a cohort of 92, 542 people with intellectual disability from a larger linked research dataset built by the Department of Developmental Disability Neuropsychiatry, School of Psychiatry, UNSW. The dataset in this paper is presented in a multi-year cross-sectional format. The cohort of people with Intellectual Disability was analysed to estimate, quantify and visualise where people with intellectual disability live in New South Wales (NSW). The cohort analysed in this dataset had been generated in an earlier project undertaken by the UNSW-based authors. This dataset was generated to share with local governments in Australia and has the potential to be more widely used in a range of health policy and planning research, and city and regional planning research environments. It represents one of the only datasets currently available in Australia on Intellectual Disability describing prevalence rates at a local government area level. This dataset allows for population comparisons in other Australian states and internationally and can be examined in combination with other social and economic datasets to continue to build evidence about disability, planning and geography.

Despite the ongoing impacts worldwide of institutionalisation on people with intellectual disability, the public knows little about large-scale disability institutions that have been the focus during the late 20th century of deinstitutionalisation efforts (historic institutions) and the people who lived there. An interdisciplinary team of researchers (including those with intellectual disability) undertook research with people with intellectual disability to explore what and how the public should learn and remember historic institutions. The project found that people with intellectual disability support community engagement with histories and lived experiences of historic institutions, in order to repair past wrongs, end contemporary practices of institutionalisation, segregation, and exclusion, and realise transformative equality and inclusion. People with intellectual disability should lead these initiatives, with appropriate support in recognising the very live memories and traumas associated with them. This article provides a model of inclusive research for turning the harms of past institutionalisation into an educational and reparative experience.