Cities are designed to accommodate certain categories of people. The approach we use to analyse cities’ urban planning will define the definition of ‘city’ itself and influence how we view it. Alas, for the time being none of them are designed for accessibility.
What is a city?
The question itself may seem quite redundant. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “place where many people live, with many houses, stores, businesses, etc.”; politologists would probably add that all these different elements have the particularity of being subject to the same governance. These definitions – certainly not wrong – are just one of the myriad interpretations of ‘cities’.
For some researchers, the city is an enterprise that must survive, and its challenges are problems to be solved. Other researchers, more romantic, see the city as a living space part of nature and evolving with it, in good and bad. Perhaps the most common vision of the city nowadays is the city as a social construct that materialises the social and political realities taking place in the geographical area.
All these visions of reality have until now failed to address the needs of persons with disabilities.
Reproduction of power
If it’s true that the design of a city visualises and reproduces the power struggles present in such cities, then we can clearly state that the average European city is a manifesto of how terribly inaccessible the entirety of our society still is.
Sidewalks too small that oblige wheelchair users to use the bike lane instead, inaccessible housing that makes the already almost impossible house hunting an even more haunting task, lights with no alternative signalisation for people with visual impairment… Our cities struggle to keep up with the values that we as a society have chosen.
Since the beginning of modern urbanism thought, all main urbanistic ideas in place have been ontologically ableist: from the Keynesian neoliberal city – expressing the importance of letting the housing market do its magic tricks – to the Howards’ garden city – which prioritised green spaces at the expense of accessibility – none of them managed to take persons with disabilities adequately.
Even the smart city, which had the ideal of improving the city in direct contact with technology, is failing to satisfy the necessities of persons with disabilities, once again perpetuating the issues the communities of persons with disabilities have been complaining about for years.
This is, to a certain extent, the same principle that is at the basis of gentrification. But where gentrification pushes out the undesired social classes through economic means or clubbing, ableism does its best at making the spaces inaccessible (which is also a sort of clubbing).
Contested spaces
Persons with disabilities co-existing in an inaccessible city is, by definition, a contested space: a space created to exclude a specific group of people until they move out. The contested space is a miracle: a sign of resistance when signs tell people that they do not belong there.
The contested space is however not immutable: on the contrary, it is a transitional space with a limited span in time. It is destined to confirm or reject the status quo.
The good news is: accessibility is bound to become the new status quo.
The accessible city
Despite the recurring ableism in urbanistic design, accessibility is becoming the new norm. We talked about the neoliberal city, the durable city, the smart city, and all these different sauces of cities theorists have been idealising for the past 50 years, but what is coming out of it is that despite theoretical fallacies, urbanism is integrating accessibility characteristics.
What started with the curb cut (and its effect) has found fertile ground in the contemporary urbanistic models: smart cities that privilege public transport accessibility, the evolution of the 10-Minute City, and the 3-30-300 rule try to become the new norm, increasing the accessibility of cities as well as creating a healthier environment that benefits everyone.
Institutions play a fundamental role in these matters: making cities accessible is a political matter and therefore subject to political choices. Making public spaces as well as private houses accessible has been a recurring fight for the disability rights movement, which often translates into pushing for pieces of legislation that enable accessibility improvements.
May we continue beseeching the European and national institutions for further political and practical implementation of inclusive cities.