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Academic papers and publications
Planning research has not yet evolved to include disability perspectives. Is it because the medical model of disability still prevails? Or is it mistakenly believed that disability is not a design issue? Some might say it’s because the needs of people with disability are fragmented across government departments. Practitioners in the planning field are required to engage with communities, but it seems the researchers are not keeping up.
Two Canadian researchers took a look at the situation. A search of five prominent planning journals showed that people with disability largely remain invisible. The researchers found just 36 articles – most of which come from the US and the UK. Only 20 had people with disability as the central topic.
The authors describe the content of the papers that go back as far as 1916. Attitudes towards people with disability clearly changed over the years but including them in research did not. Papers that did mention people with disability generally added them to a list of other groups considered vulnerable or marginalised.
The paper concludes:
“Planning researchers and practitioners, therefore, must continue to question what knowledge, assumptions, and biases we may have toward PWD and experiences of disability that manifest through our environment. More broadly, planning scholarship can be strengthened by continuous questioning of self—on the processes through which certain knowledge is produced or a pursuit of certain knowledge is prioritised within the discipline. The development of critical discourse focusing on PWD can be a vehicle for such self-reflection.
The title of the article is, The Precarious Absence of Disability Perspectives in Planning Research. It is open access on cogitation press website, or you can download directly.
Planning is also about design. And good design now includes users. Community involvement is a key part of planning processes. It must take account of our human diversity otherwise designs will unintentionally exclude. Community involvement in planning also introduces designers and planners to “other ways of being”.
Design and planning go hand in hand, but design has been a subject to avoid in planning, particularly in the U.S. This is according to a journal article that challenges planners to move beyond policies of spatial organisation.
The article covers climate change and climate justice, and social and racial justice. A workshop using collaborative processes is the basis of a case study highlighting the issues. Community involvement was pivotal to the success of the project and the research outcomes. The subject of the case study is an affordable housing provider. The aim was to move from standard cookie cutter designs to designs that suited the potential residents. The new design was applied to a prototype home.
The author concludes that there are profound implications for planning research. Designers need to engage with planning because they can better address the social and environmental concerns.
The title of the article is, Design in Planning: Reintegration through Shifting Values.
Design is increasingly entering planning beyond the subfield of urban design. At a larger scale, designers are moving into the social sciences to apply design skills at intersections with the social sciences. This article offers an overview of research and practice at the forefront of both interpreting design fields and understanding their growing importance within planning. This transcends examinations of urban design to incorporate the potential of design more broadly in planning, with particular emphasis on community development and engagement.
The article does this through a case study of an existing design-based nonprofit (bcWORKSHOP) which leverages techniques across design and planning to generate new forms of community planning practice in the State of Texas. Ultimately, this case study begins to ask whether planning can fully address a number of issues (like social/racial justice and climate change) without understanding these issues from both design and planning perspectives simultaneously. It also emphasizes the importance of training planners to both envision and build alternate possible worlds, a skillset fundamental to design that could reshape planning education and practice.
The idea of smart cities, driverless cars, and artificial intelligence is propelling us into the unknown. But there are some things we can predict. Everyday things will be seen in a new light. The kerbside for example. Other than kerb ramps most of us don’t think about the kerbside and mobility. But somebody else has.
The Future of Place webpage has a link to a report that looks at the Future Ready Kerbside. The publication by Uber and WSP explores what the future might hold in the context of shared mobility and liveable cities.
The kerb is the intersection between the pedestrian area and the road. How space is allocated each side of the kerb dictates who can access these spaces. The kerbside is not passive infrastructure so we need to prepare for its future use. It needs careful management by city leaders.
There are ten recommendations in the Executive Summary of the report and they include:
The full report is titled, Place and Mobility: Future Ready Kerbside and has more technical detail. Both the full report and the executive summary have interesting infographics and images depicting how the future might look.
Pedestrians are becoming more diverse. Consequently, moving through public spaces needs more design consideration by urban designers. It also means accessibility and safety is more than having kerb ramps and level footpaths. Pedestrians on wheels is a new paradigm.
Mobility will become more complex as mobility choices increase especially with battery powered devices. We already have a diversity of pedestrians. They come with baby strollers, wheeled suitcases, wheelchairs, guide dogs, walking frames, and skateboards. Then we add powered devices: mobility scooters, wheelchairs, Segways, hover-boards, and e-scooters. And the line between mobility aids and other wheeled devices is blurring in terms of road and footpath use.
Manoeuvring around all these different pedestrians is difficult enough. Then we need to add in people who are using umbrellas, carrying large parcels, pushing delivery trolleys, and those looking in shop windows and their smart phones. And let’s not forget bicycles and e-bikes.
An interesting study on personal mobility devices is reported in “Diversity of “Pedestrians on Wheels”, New Challenges for Cities in 21st Century“. The article has a surprisingly long list of different categories of pedestrians and their differing obstacles and needs. For example, pedestrians with wheeled elements and pedestrians requiring more action time.
Traffic management authorities collect data on vehicle traffic flows, but not pedestrian movements. Data are, however, collected on pedestrian road accidents and deaths. Pedestrians who feel unsafe on the street will curtail their movement in their neighbourhood. The number of journeys not made because of road and street design are not known.
In the conclusions, the authors discuss the need for regulations for users and on the use of the devices, and using designs which can be easily detected by other pedestrians by using colour and sound.
New ideas about “Movement and Place” are at odds with the “Roads and Traffic” paradigm. Something will have to give if we want more walking. People limit where they go based on how safe they feel. Pedestrian crossings aren’t designed with all pedestrians in mind – they’re designed with traffic flows in mind.
Reality shows us that pedestrian diversity is a reality that is becoming increasingly complex. In the 20th century the car set aside horse carriages and pedestrians. In the same way, 21st century pedestrians are taking centre stage with policies for walkability. But the design of streets for this new paradigm has yet to be solved.
Citizens on scooters, skates, skateboards, Segways, and unicycles, are added to the already traditional baby strollers, wheelchairs, and suitcases with wheels. “Pedestrians on wheels” poses new challenges of coexistence and design. These are considerations of universal accessibility that we cannot leave out while our society progresses.
This paper identifies some of these new needs and presents a progressive analysis in three phases: 1 classification of the different user of the street, 2 study of the Personal Mobility Devices (PMD) and 3, the new accessibility barriers that arise with the use of PMD. As a result, some action strategies are pointed out to respond to the difficulties of accessibility derived from this new reality and to integrate them into the universal design of the urban public space.
The article is from the proceedings of the UDHEIT 2018 conference held in Dublin, Ireland. It is open access publication.
Micromobility is now accessible for people with disability thanks to seven new designs launched by Lime. They are not “disability” specific – just good design useable by more people. The article is on FastCompany website.
“But I spoke to three different people who had three different disabilities, and you realise that the communication has to be targeted. Because those three people required completely different things. And the information they got was not in a mode which they could use.”
What makes good design in the built environment, and who is it good for? And how do you measure the value of good design? These are vexed questions when it comes to everyone who has a stake in urban environments and housing. Property developers will have one idea of value, designers another, and users and occupiers will have yet another view. So how to bring this together and measure good design? It’s not an added extra.
An article by urban researchers and the Victorian Government Architect discusses these issues. The construction industry is considered a major contributor to Australia’s economy. Consequently, measurements of value will be in dry economic terms. But value to citizens cannot be measured with existing economic models. This requires qualitative measures – that is, asking people about their experiences with the built environment. The article has charts comparing different perspectives on design and value that make the points well.
The title of the article is Placing a value on good design for cities: evidence and prospects. Although published in 2014, the content remains relevant today. The article joins the dots between the public environment and our homes.
“The challenge is to broaden from readily measured elements of design such as cost per square metre or apartment size, to include the less readily measured ones such as sense of security or good ventilation…” One architect argued that good design “improves the function and usability of the house, while reducing building costs.” This was achieve by reducing the “‘wasted’ hallway space by 5%, translating to a reduced construction cost of around $18,000.”
There is a companion article with an emphasis on apartment design.
The built environment has value. Most commonly, that value is established through market prices for rent or purchase. Some elements of value, while recognised as important, are under-appreciated as it is difficult for them to be directly monetised or quantified in other terms. The value of the built environment to the community of public stakeholders, may differ and conflict with those of individual private stakeholders.
This paper works with the proposition that good design in the built environment imparts value and that there is a need to articulate value in order to inform decisions about what is good design and how to achieve best value built environment outcomes.
Arguments for good design must rest on a rigorous evidence base, with a clear methodology for establishing a cost-benefit assessment process or other consistent measurement approaches. Research addressing these issues has been investigated internationally, particularly from the UK. However, the value of good design is under researched in Australia.
This paper presents a review of the current state of research into the value of good design for the built environment, both in Australia and internationally. Following this, methods to address key gaps for valuation are presented and steps for further research outlined.
Observations during the 2011 Tsunami disaster in Japan showed that the colour of signage matters a lot. A short research paper outlines the colours and colour combinations that are easily seen and interpreted quickly by people who have one of the colour blindness conditions. The result is colour combinations for everyone.
The results of this study and other colour studies are reflected in the Japanese standards for the paint, printing and design industries. The colour scheme-set contains 20 colours and is divided into groups depending on whether things are small scale or large scale. Bright pink turned out to be a colour for large signage. For more on the colours go to the Open Journal of Social Science and download the five page article, “Color Barrier Free Displays in Disaster Situations”.