This chapter comments on housing circumstances for disabled people, considers market and non-market provision, discusses universal and inclusive standards, and concludes with observations about change, citizenship and self-management. First, however, we position ourselves in relation to general debates about disabling environments, and emphasise the importance of disabled people's ideas and campaigns.

Disability is understood below as something resulting from persistent devaluing of people with impairments, their exclusion from good incomes and jobs, and lack of concern for their needs in the arrangement of physical spaces and social networks. This perspective derives primarily from advocates of the social model of disability who challenged earlier formulations within medicalised or individualised accounts in which disability was presented as an attribute of particular people deviating from a supposed physical norm (see Barnes, 1994, p ix; Oliver and Barnes, 1998). In very immediate senses individuals feel limitations from an impairment, and physical or sensory impairment may trigger disadvantage in labour markets or in access to aspects of social life. Yet societal responses are also crucial, and varied over time and place, for disability is “culturally produced and socially structured” (Oliver, 1990, p 22). We do not think of disability as located in the individual, as a characteristic defined by a medical condition or functional limitations. Rather, we see it as a product of social and environmental processes which constitute people as disabled.

This is not to deny the importance of impairment or illness, or the diversity of individual feelings about these. Chronic illness may influence daily living, social relationships, and people's sense of who they are. Impairment may bring pain, fatigue, and depression, but also positive attributes, while an individual's sense of difference related to this may be an important part of identity (see discussion in Crow, 1996; Morris, 1991, pp 17-18; cf Allen, 1998, pp 96, 102). We also accept that some people experiencing mental distress or behavioural difficulties might be a worry to others, to a degree independent of societal structures (or the social construction of mental health). In tandem with the social model's use of ‘disability’, therefore, ‘specific impairments’ refers to people's distinctive physical, mental, health or socio-medical attributes, often generating particular preferences or needs, and lying along a continuum on which everyone has a place.