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Introduction: Disability and community development

Worldwide, 600 million people live with disability, 80% of whom live in developing countries (World Health Organization, 2005). But the idea of disability is controversial, influenced by culture and competing conceptual systems (Altman, 2001; Zola, 1993). Fujiura and Rutkowski-Kmitta (2001) argue that industrialized Western nations tend to emphasize a restricted-activity approach to estimate the rate of disability within their populations, including: Australia (14.2%), Canada (13.2%), New Zealand (19.0%), and Spain (14.9%). Using this approach, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that about 49 million U.S. citizens over the age of five years experience a disability, with about 38 million living in urban and 11 million living in rural communities (Enders, 2005). About half of these experience significant disability. Historically, regardless of the approach to defining disability, society reacted to people with disability by stigmatizing, institutionalizing, criminalizing, marginalizing, and medicalizing them (Braddock & Parish, 2001). During the past 30 years, a new, ecological paradigm of disability has emerged, one that focuses attention on the environment's contributions to disability rather than placing the cause of disability solely within the individual (Pope & Tarlov, 1991). This view--a social rather than a medical model of disability--supported the de-institutionalization movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and led to the development of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. More recently, the World Health Organization revised its International Classification of Function, Disability, and Health (World Health Organization, 2001) to emphasize disability as the product of the interaction between an individual and his or her environment. In this ecological framework, the environment is generally taken to mean the community. The outcome of the interaction between the individual and the environment may be measured by the degree of participation in community life. Under this framework, there are new opportunities for partnerships between people with disabilities, disability advocates, and community development researchers and practitioners. The articles in this collection touch on the intersection between disability and community development. They report on studies of disability advocacy, accessible and affordable housing, economic development, community planning, transportation, and access to faith communities. They report studies that involve people with disabilities associated with a wide range of impairments, including mobility as well as cognitive, psychiatric, and sensory impairments. The authors in this issue describe how theories of independent living and community development overlap, and how methods from both are being applied by disability advocates to achieve their dreams and aspirations for equity, freedom, and dignity. O'Day introduces readers to independent living philosophy and the national network of Centers for Independent Living (CIL) that promote the empowerment of people with disabilities from all causes through advocacy at the local, state, and national levels. Her national study shows that CILs and their consumers focus a great deal of advocacy efforts on changing community environments and systems of service such as housing, transportation, and employment. She argues that CILs may be good partners for broader community development agencies. Hernandez and her colleagues describe an example of participatory action research and advocacy conducted by citizens with disabilities in a large city. They emphasize how advocacy by people with disability achieves the two defining aspects of community--solidarity and agency--described by Bhattacharyya (2004). They also demonstrate the changes in the environment that local advocacy can achieve. In the process, they highlight the fact that people with disability can be a minority within a minority group. Maisel introduces the concept of "visitability" in housing--a growing movement across the country to achieve a minimal level of accessible housing so that people with mobility impairments--some 6. …