Lisa Stafford

Planning Walkable Neighborhoods: Are We Overlooking Diversity in Abilities and Ages?

Despite growing numbers of studies on planning walkable neighborhoods, few have included people with diverse abilities across the age spectrum. This article demonstrates a need for more inclusion of human diversity in walkable neighborhoods research to better inform policy, planning, and design interventions that are spatially and socially just for all ages and all abilities. Our study addresses this through a critical review of the literature, highlighting existing research practices, known person–environment influences on walkability, and limitations within current knowledge. We recommend future integrated and inclusive research directions to encapsulate diversity of abilities and ages in walkable neighborhood studies.

‘What about my voice’: emancipating the voices of children with disabilities through participant-centred methods

ABSTRACT Children with diverse physical, communication and/or cognitive impairments are often overlooked as active research participants. This paper challenges and lays bare norms and constructs, such as ableism and adultism, which lead to children with disabilities being left out or researched by-proxy. Additionally, the paper contests these constructs through discussing and presenting participant-centred research methods that seeks to enable children’s involvement and establish them as legitimate research participants. The application of these methods in children geography studies is illustrated through the author’s own use of creative methods of activity-based interviews and co-construction narration with older children with various physical/neurological impairments. Overall, the aim of the paper is to bridge some gaps, dispel assumptions and inspire researchers with additional ways of conceptualising and approaching research with children with disabilities, since the inclusion of all children in research rests with researchers and their understanding and use of appropriate research methods.

Journeys to play: planning considerations to engender inclusive playspaces

Abstract Making playspaces inclusive has predominately focused on internal design, addressing factors that constrain play experiences within these spaces for children with diverse impairments and their families. Less attention, however, has been paid to the journey to the site and how that may influence the decision to visit these environments. This paper contributes to this area by discussing the experiences of 10 children with diverse mobility impairments, aged 9–12-years-old, and their families from south-east Queensland, Australia. This person–environment study of their journeys to playgrounds illuminates the role getting to the site and entering the site plays in shaping decisions to actually visit playspaces. The findings also identify key considerations applicable to open space planning and site planning, towards achieving inclusive landscapes for play.

Why one size fits all approach to transition in Disability Employment Services hinders employability of young people with physical and neurological disabilities in Australia

The education-to-work pathways for young people with disabilities are becoming more diverse and lengthier in our post-industrial economy. Furthermore, it is recognized that a multitude of barriers still remain in securing employment at the end of these pathways. In this paper, we focus on Australia’s Disability Employment Services (DES) to understand how views of transition in DES policy may be influencing program rules in supporting secondary and tertiary students with physical and/or neurological disabilities in their employability and employment. We do this through critical policy analysis of DES and in-depth Interpretive accounts from service providers and advocacy organizations.

New Mobilities for Accessible Cities: Toward Scenarios for Seamless Journeys

While cities increasingly attest to plans to make their resources accessible for people with disabilities, the realities of achieving the travel considered integral to urban life continue to be frustrating and prohibitive for this group. Accessing the basic opportunities of contemporary urban life now presupposes the supports and resources afforded by new mobilities, combining virtual and actual travel and communication in negotiating our work, leisure, connections with families, and culture. For the researchers applying the new mobilities paradigm, this requires a focus that is suited to capturing movement and its spatial and temporal coordinates and should also turn to illuminate the darker side of these relationships: coerced immobility experienced by people with disabilities. This chapter discusses an approach to research and the development of design scenarios — concepts emerging from research that may inform design — that take seriously the role of movement, time, and space in the achievement of valued connections by individuals with disabilities with particular reference to the journey to work. In particular we apply, in a case study, concepts of time and space that are relevant to the in situ experience of getting to work; raising questions regarding the way getting ready and travelling are experienced in the context of risk and contingency, and the actual and potential role of the technical, material, and social environment. We then respond to the analysis of this case with a discussion about the way emergent scenarios can imagine “possible or preferable futures” for the mobile citizenship of people with disabilities.