Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building

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 and 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 and that is the design of the

housing the location of the housing and

how it influences people's independence

autonomy and their community

participation

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

crowler state and she is a participant

in the research that i'm doing on

supported accommodation and finding out

people's experiences of living in their

own apartment and receiving support

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i had the opportunity to meet over 25

people who live here and who received

support and in particular we'd do some

tours of people's apartments and they'd

speak about the design what they did

what they enjoyed doing what they don't

like about aspects within the built

environment how long have you lived here

for i'm maybe about

i've been living here about four weeks

and a half

what are some of the things you love

about living

a dog oh yeah the dogs are there any

cafes you'd like to go to i really like

the color or the cafe and what do you

have

now

it's about capturing the stories people

here and 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 sport have really

only had one choice and that's living in

a group home this model is an

alternative and 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

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