Smart and sustainable cities inclusive of people with disabilities

Subtitle:an exploratory study using digital tools and participatory practices

Cities are still not conducive to the needs of people with disabilities, and even modern conceptualisations of smart and sustainable cities seem to be to some extent unprepared to meet the requirements of disability inclusion. Thus, inclusion is still not reflected in the real lives of people with disabilities. The main research questions explored in this thesis are the issues of what a disability-inclusive city truly means, and how can we make its complexity more comprehensive to relevant stakeholders, allowing them to respond with informed measures. In this context, potential approaches, methods and tools that can be used to enhance disability-inclusive city planning, design and governance are explored. The objective is to design a novel methodological framework and useful practical tools for future urban research, practice and decision making. A city is a complex system of subsystems that need to work together as a whole. It is argued here that due to the complex and diverse nature of both disability inclusion and the city itself, and due to the overwhelming complexity of current political, legislative and standardisation frameworks in the disability domain, new holistic, integrative and participatory models are needed to help stakeholders tackle this complexity. Previous research has shown that cities still face an insurmountable number of societal challenges, especially when considering the design of cities that are inclusive of all their inhabitants. In order to tackle these challenges, a vision is put forward of a holistic approach to disability-inclusive city design. A disability-inclusive city is conceptualised as a holistically designed and purposeful system of subsystems that respects disability inclusion as a basic principle. Using participatory research grounded in deep, slow and small-data-oriented ethnographic techniques, the way in which these challenges appear and interact via the dimensions of human-space-technology is explored. An exemplary novel methodological framework is developed with a four-dimensional model and a corresponding combined methodological approach that is designed to help cities explore the needs, characteristics, opinions, aspirations, desires, constraints and attitudes of people with disabilities towards their disability, the governance of the city, the spaces they use and the technology that could help make the city more accessible. In the context of the contemporary digitalised world, in which technology penetrates our everyday lives, an exploration is carried out of the currently available digital tools that can help people with disabilities, city authorities and researchers in paving the way towards more disability-inclusive cities. Within this exploration, I also investigate what these tools can do, how they can be used, what benefits they bring to disability-inclusive design and how they impact the lives of people with disabilities in the city. The fieldwork presented here shows that technology can both enable and disable people with vii disabilities in terms of using space, meaning that it may be of great use and can augment the physical world by adding additional layers of immaterial information for people with disabilities but it cannot magically remove barriers for them. It may also change the disability itself, and thus limit both the use of the space and the technology. This in-depth participatory work shows how important it is to understand the complexity, diversity and individuality among citizens to enable the informed, responsive, disability-inclusive design of both cities and technology. The proposed methodological framework specifically responds to this gap, and provides a methodological contribution that goes beyond this research. Finally, by designing a novel Disability Inclusion Evaluation Tool (DIETool) with a Disability Inclusion Performance Index (DIPI) component, I attempt to close the circle and to respond to the initial vision of a holistically designed disability-inclusive city. The proposed tool translates complex political, legislative and standardisation requirements into a simple, comprehensive form that can guide cities towards an improved understanding of where they are in terms of disability inclusion performance in 20 different areas of city life. As an evaluation and monitoring tool that is unique in the disability domain, it represents the final contribution of this research.

Publication year:2020

Keywords:Doctoral thesis

Accessibility:Open