Search results

Within the urban planning profession, designing for the needs of people with impairments has rarely been a significant feature of planning theory and instruction. Given the role of urban planners in affecting the opinions of policy-makers and the public, the prevalence of negative and misinformed attitudes among planning professionals toward impaired populations has been highlighted as requiring study. This paper reports on the effectiveness of awareness training with regard to its influence on the attitudes of urban planning students toward the needs of people with impairments and accessible design. Using an established attitude assessment instrument (the Attitudes Towards Disablement Scale), pre and post-awareness training data were collected from 112 urban planning students. Results from the present study suggest that awareness training can result in significant attitude changes, independent of the student’s gender or prior familiarity with impairment. The paper concludes with recommendations and caveats for planning education and research.