published_or_final_version / Conservation / Master / Master of Science in Conservation

With rights to access now become basic human rights, it demands a tool for building disability inclusiveness assessment to tell how far we have gone to include persons with disabilities (PWDs) in buildings. Calling for more researches in disability inclusive facilities and inclusive education in various international conventions and statements such as the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006) and the UNESCO Salamanca Statement (1994), the Physical Disability Inclusion Sub-score (PDIS) and the Visual Impairment Inclusion Sub-score (VIIS) as simple, quantitative and more objective tools for assessing higher education buildings were developed here. Other than that whether building professionals have knowledge of the way PWDs access and use buildings were at the same time examined. This study consists of four parts with (1) conception, (2) the PDIS and the VIIS for assessing the disability inclusiveness of buildings, (3) main survey and (4) conclusion. By way of literature review, the PDIS and the VIIS frameworks were constructed and they were fine-tuned with inputs from building professionals and users with impairments in the pilot phase. NSFDSS but not the far more popular AHP was applied to weight the elements under the PDIS and the VIIS for both credibility and practicality reasons. In all, between March and July 2012, 20 building professionals, 22 persons with physical disability and 21 persons with visual impairment were surveyed. The PDIS and the VIIS then developed were much simplified with around 200 items under about 20 categories. Design was weighed by all to be more important than Management. Following that 48 higher education buildings from four universities in Hong Kong were assessed in March to September 2013. The dispersal of the PDIS and the VIIS were found largely due to Design rather than Management. In the disability inclusion performance of different categories, Operations and Maintenance, and Management Approaches were respectively the best and the least well performed categories, and Vertical Circulation and Entrance were the more disability inclusive Design categories. As for hypothesis testing, 13 working hypotheses were developed from 4 main hypotheses. By Spearman’s rank correlation test or the t-test, it was found that building professionals and both persons with physical disability and persons with visual impairment did not weigh the elements under the PDIS and the VIIS differently, and the mean values of the standard deviation of the weightings given by users with impairments were not greater than those given by building professionals. It is evidenced that building professionals somehow have knowledge of the way the physically impaired and the visually impaired access and use buildings, and impaired users are not biased on their experience. Having the PDIS and the VIIS developed, it is in pole position to adjust and apply them to study other buildings such as health care facilities and office buildings. Towards a more progressively aggressive step is to make changes to them to examine the more complex issue of ageing friendliness of buildings for the grey population following WHO Age-friendly Environments Programme. / published_or_final_version / Real Estate and Construction / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Thesis--Wisconsin. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-85).

Thesis (M.T.R.P.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2008.

Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1981. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [90]-93).

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1981. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 115-116).

Thesis (M. Arch.)--University of Hong Kong, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.Arch.)--University of Hong Kong, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print.

This dissertation is not only about the production of a building: it is rather a progressive report, which documents the process and development of my personal manifesto of the inter-relationships between: the social and physical effects of sport activities and people with disabilities, in public open spaces in the city. It aims to serve as an instrument to demonstrate the insight of my experiences, from taking a contemporary social issue (segregation of disabled people from the main society) and urban issues (lack of interests and abandonments of public park spaces in our city) into architectural theories. The research did not begin from a particular point towards a specific building type or programme; instead, I located the base of the research by reinterpreting a personal experience and looking into a specific social/contextual condition. It begins with an assessment of people with disabilities and the built environments in the form of interviews, surveys and academic research. The aim of this exercise is to provide first hand contact with disabled peoples’ needs and priorities. Then the theoretical research which revolves around the notion of public safety in the park - one of the major reasons which decrease the willingness of the public to use it. Together with the findings derived from site analysis and precedent studies, I will then consolidate the arguments by developing an experimental architectural prototype which directly aims to substantiate the theory, and the building structure itself will be the projector that materializes the programme into real context and thus gives justification to my manifesto.