Enabling Built Environments Program

The Enabling Built Environments Program (EBEP) is an initiative of the Faculty of the Built Environment at UNSW, with core funding from the NSW Department of Human Services through the HACC program.

What is the EBEP?

The EBEP, within the City Futures Research Centre, brings together a number of streams of funded research from organisations such as the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI); the Home and Community Care program and Industry entities like Caroma. All of our research is concerned with how the built environment at industrial to housing and town centre design levels impacts human function, quality of life and health/care costs for older people, people with disabilities and their carers.

Understanding the complex transactions between the built environment and humans has become an increasingly critical factor in creating and maintaining sustainable informal and self-care systems for all nations with the global advent of population ageing.

The EBEP benefits from its contract and casual staff having a diverse skill set that includes Industrial Design, Occupational Therapy, Social Sciences, Policy planning and Architecture. The EBEP receives recurrent core funding from the Home and Community Care Program and works on a range of projects concurrently from both the macro level, such as performance of town centres and housing supply, to the micro level such as temperature regulation valves, smoke detectors and the like.

Our Vision

We aim to facilitate enabling environments in all areas of living: from personal spaces in the home to public spaces at school, work and the urban landscape in general.

Our Focus Areas

Because of the diverse range of professions within our team, we are particularly skilled in synthesising large-scale systematic literature searches across discipline areas relevant to a particular topic of interest. Our meta-analysis explicitly lists inclusion and exclusion criteria and is used to carefully identify all moderating variables. Our methods have become increasingly critical in drawing out evidence-based research previously overlooked or inaccessible because of their highly specialised areas of discipline expertise.

The Home Modification Information (HMinfo) Clearinghouse service sits at the core of this work having ongoing recurrent funding since 2002, when it was first established as a part of the Government’s ongoing public sector reform of Home and Community Care services. HMinfo is an information service tasked with creating an evidence base for housing retrofit interventions to support the Home Maintenance and Modification Services. The HMinfo service delivers evidence-based literature reviews; summary bulletins and fact sheets, based on researching how particular built environments (i.e. products, materials and services) impact human functionality outcomes by increasing or decreasing disability thresholds. We are also responsible for making it available online for practitioners, organisations and policy makers in a usable and accessible format is an important part of our dissemination program. All HMinfo research is disseminated via our online platform at: www.homemods.info

Our Objectives

Build information and knowledge capacity within the residential and public construction sectors in order to improve design standards and to provide evidence for the effectiveness of special features to better the living environments of aged and/or people with disabilities, and their carers.

• Integrate diverse knowledge and cross-disciplinary research.
• Develop a leading edge enabling environments research cluster that will be accessible to the full range of industry and consumer target groups.
• Facilitate home and community care outcomes, focusing on residential and town centre design strategies.
• Promote innovative residential models for older people and people with disabilities within the building and development industry.
• Develop Factsheets detailing best practice principles for assessment and the setting of priorities for planning, assessment and intervention services.
• Promote the benefits and products of more enabling design to the broader community through mainstream media.
• Share information at International, National, State and Regional industry forums and liaise with peak regional providers and consumers.
• Ensure that there are effective links between built environment service providers and their end users.