Human wellbeing is deeply influenced by the local environment, but the needs of children with disabilities are often left out when it comes to urban planning. With her ARC Future Fellowship, Professor Hannah Badland is working to change that.
Professor Badland's project aims to understand how children with disabilities interact with the built environment in the neighbourhood context, and how it impacts their opportunities and the trajectory of their life.
Though urban policy considers children and people with disabilities as their own groups, she says children with disabilities are often overlooked. The needs of children with disabilities are unique and require unique policy and planning.
'Looking at that group is really important because we know that for children, the early years are a significant time for brain development. If they can get into inclusive education, for example, it sets up their trajectory for life,' says Professor Badland.
She notes that many children with disabilities get excluded from education in their early years. 'They're not in kindies and daycares because infrastructure is not there to support them,' she says.
'When we look at the availability of kindergartens and daycares, guess what? The high-quality ones are in advantaged neighbourhoods. So, you have this double disadvantage.'
This is why she's specifically interested in how we can design better, more inclusive, neighbourhoods. By designing neighbourhoods that support children with disabilities, she says we can address both their immediate needs and their long-term wellbeing. In fact, it sets the foundation for an inclusive and equitable future.
'That the community you're in allows for diversity to be accepted and welcomed and makes everyone feel like they belong right from the start, is really important.'
Professor Badland says this can help ensure that all children with disabilities get to 'be part of the kid cohort, that they're going down and playing at the parks, that they've got the same independence, that've got the same rights afforded'.
Her project has several components, including a policy review to better understand the current urban design landscape and quantitative modelling to create practical actionable knowledge for policymakers about what works for children with disabilities.
Currently, Professor Badland is conducting critical qualitative research to find out what children with disabilities need. She is specifically focusing on children under 12 who have sensory and intellectual disabilities, which are most common in younger children.
'We think we know what is important for kids with disability, but we don't actually know,' says Professor Badland.
What we do know typically comes from parents reporting on their children. There are 'assumptions that the kids can't speak for themselves, or they won't, but that's not actually true. It's just that we need to change the way we do our research.'
She admits this is challenging and requires out of the box thinking: 'just asking kids is a really hard thing, whether they're disabled or not. Kids just don't think that way. They're thinking in the here and now, and they need to almost locate themselves in the conversation'.
In current workshops, for example, children are given Lego City sets to create neighbourhoods that feature what they think is important.
According to Professor Badland, ARC funding is what makes this work possible. It allows researchers to start building teams, bring others' ideas in, and experiment with new ways of doing research.
'You can really think about things differently…and you can take those skills and learnings and tools that you picked up during the fellowship and start applying those to other research projects.'
