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Disability and the City

Disability is a diverse lived experience that is frequently shaped by barriers and exclusions in the context of the city. Definitions of disability that stress the way in which the organization of society serves to disadvantage people by a devaluation of the disabled body shed particular light on the barriers that shape disabled people's access to urban spaces and participation in city life. Inaccessible buildings and transport, or unclear signage, are some of the more obvious manifestations of these barriers. Disabled people and disability groups are, however, increasingly challenging and influencing urban policy processes and decisions about urban space. The experience of disability therefore illuminates processes of social division, exclusion, and resistance which are manifest in, and shape, the urban environment.

Definitions of Disability

Definitions of disability have tended to revolve around two different conceptual starting points, expressed as the medical and social models of disability. The former equates disability with a biological impairment or condition that needs to be treated or cured if the individual is to function normally in everyday life. Hence, disability is located in the individual and understood in terms of the limitations of a “less than normal” body. This medicalized definition has arguably dominated understandings of disability in Western society. However, since the 1970s this definition has been challenged by disabled people, who have critiqued its representation of disability as a personal tragedy and disabled people as dependent and worthy of charity. In setting out a social model of disability, an emergent disability movement has located the “problem” of disability within the structures and social relations of a society that systematically ignores the needs of people with impairments.

Proponents of the social model draw a distinction between the terms impairment, as the actual bodily limitation or physiological state, and disability, as the construction of a society that devalues impaired bodies, thereby leading to disabled people's economic, political, social, and cultural marginalization. According to the social model, it is within the structures and organization of society rather than in disabled people's physiology or impairment that we are to find the answers to questions about disabled people's unequal status. The model has become the basis for the development of a disability movement that stresses disabled people's rights as citizens and calls for their equal participation in society. However, this model has been criticized for underplaying the bodily pain that many disabled people experience, as well as for more readily explaining the experiences of people with physical or mobility impairments, rather than those with learning disabilities or mental illness. It has thereby been accused of failing to address the heterogeneity of disability.

Barriers in the Disabling City

The insights of the social model nevertheless open up an understanding of the ways in which the contemporary city serves to disable individuals through its social, political, and economic organization. A key locus of debates about disabled people's access to the city lies in the built environment, whether this be understood as public thoroughfares, private and public buildings (including places of consumption, workplaces, civic amenities, and housing), or indeed transport systems. The barriers that render the city environment inaccessible are often clear to see: For example, for people with mobility impairments or wheelchair users, the absence of ramps into buildings, doorways that are too narrow, or broken paving stones are huge impediments. For others, they are less visible: A lack of clear and simple signage for people with learning difficulties, or the absence of induction loops for people with hearing impairments, mediate the experience of access. The presence of these barriers in the built environment hinders disabled people's ability to move around unaided and limits their participation in city life, whether as consumers, workers, or as members of local groups or communities. The physical fabric of the city has therefore been seen as a spatial manifestation of disabled people's oppression in society, reflecting a historical legacy in which many disabled people were sequestered away from society and thus came to be seen as “out of place” in urban environments and public space.

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