Building on our experience in leading nationally significant housing, planning and urban renewal initiatives, we specialise in integrating the dimensions that create dynamic and healthy urban environments.
Interactive Housing Assessment for People with Disability
Urbanista has developed an interactive workshop and modelling framework to enable and empower people with disability to access suitable housing. Our interactive tools are purpose designed to assist people with disability to identify their housing requirements, to explore suitable options and to aid the refinement of suitable and viable housing projects. They also help groups who want to pool resources to provide housing.
Background
Urbanista is a planning and strategy consultancy with a focus on affordable housing and in the use of customised modelling tools to assist in responding to complex challenges (see www.urbanista.com.au for more details).
We have developed a workshop framework and interactive tools that enable people with disability to explore housing options and for housing providers to work with people with disability to develop feasible and suitable responses in keeping with the principles behind the NDIS.
Using our purpose designed modelling tools and our expertise in planning and development, the framework enables us to work through an interactive process to identify individual requirements, prepare a group housing brief, identify and evaluate alternatives for consideration and facilitate an outcome.
Key features
- Places individuals and family groups at the centre of the planning and decision making process
- Designed to be used interactively, either in a workshop setting or more incrementally
- Assists housing organisations to work together with people with disability, their carers and family groups
- Enables individuals and groups to define their housing requirements and links this to the identification, evaluation and refinement of suitable housing options
- Incorporates financial feasibility assessment and comparison of alternatives
- Compares the costs and benefits for alternative options for meeting identified needs and requirements
- Facilitates resource pooling and optimising leveraging from varied funding sources
- Outputs can be used as a basis for engagement with individuals, family groups and other organisations
- Generate a housing/project brief in response to identified needs and financial criteria
- Aids business case development
The framework also has capacity to be adapted for aiding the planning and delivery of housing in other ways.
Click here to download one page overview
Some Other Capabilities
While the framework has initially been designed to be used in a workshop setting, it can be used more incrementally or adapted to assist in various aspects of the planning, delivery and allocation of housing.
Individual Housing Briefs and Group Project Briefs could link with the stock profile of a housing provider to identify housing available to meet the individual or collective requirements identified and to enable existing housing resources to be better utilised.
The tool could also assist in identifying and, if appropriate, linking people with similar requirements to facilitate group planning in order to optimise the use of available resources and support better housing outcomes.
Where appropriate, data on individual participants could be captured in advance, to streamline the workshop process and enable more time to be devoted to the exploration and refinement of housing options.
The framework enables analysis of housing requirements and options from the perspective of a person with disability seeking their optimal housing choice by leading them through the key decisions and choices to be made at an individual level and, where appropriate a group level, and feeding the inputs from this into the identification, evaluation and refinement of suitable housing options.
The framework facilitates resource pooling by enabling individuals with disability, their family groups and carers to work together to identify available resources and collective requirements.
It assists individuals and groups to identify and layer various sources of funds and optimise opportunities for leveraging.
The tool allows individuals and groups to choose broad housing types or to work interactively with a housing provider to select from the range of possible housing models available and to refine preferred options to suit preferences and requirements. Where a housing provider is involved in the process, tailored housing models can be integrated into the framework.
The tool incorporates feasibility evaluation so that the viability of housing options can be assessed as part of the process and choices revised in the light of this.
Outputs
The tool produces an Individual Housing Brief which can be combined at a group level to provide a Group Project Brief, together with a Resourcing Plan.
Based on these, the tool identifies suitable housing options and assesses their feasibility. A Comparative Summary of Preferred Options is produced detailing the respective characteristics and capital/ongoing cost structure of selected alternatives.
All procurement methods can be analysed including new construction, purchase, redevelopment, adaptive reuse and utilisation of existing housing stock held by a provider.
The tool can be used iteratively to evaluate, compare and refine options in order to shape and inform choices about housing and drive project development.
Supports project development – Where an agreed project is being advanced, modelling can be progressively refined as more precise data on financial and other parameters becomes available.
