Rob Imrie

While the design of urban space provides an opportunity to create places sensitised to the manifold complexities of the body, places continue to be designed with little understanding of the interrelationships between design, disability and space. One issue is the absence of embodied knowledge about impairment in urban design, and the understanding of disability as an aberration, not intrinsic to the crafting of well-designed environments. With the focus on vision impairment, the paper evaluates a popular approach to improving the quality of street environments, shared space, in which pavements and roads are merged into single and shared surfaces. Data from a study of English local authorities show that the diverse needs of vision-impaired people are barely recognised or given a platform to influence shared space policy. It is suggested that this marginalisation of vision-impaired people is part of a post-political condition, in which deliberative techniques, such as public consultation, are part of a process to manage those that dissent from the preferred policy choice—i.e. shared space. An implication is the depoliticisation of shared space policy in which the unequal, and unjust, ways in which urban design impacts on vision-impaired people are neither articulated nor recognised by formal policy programmes.

(2012). Disabled people and housing: choices, opportunities and barriers, by Laura Hemingway, Bristol, The Policy Press, 2011, 224 pp., £24.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-84-742805-9. Disability & Society: Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 450-452.

Many urban environments are being redesigned around a relatively new approach to street design termed shared space. Shared space is a traffic engineering concept that eliminates physical barriers separating motor vehicles, pedestrians, and other road users to encourage a sharing of street space. Such sharing is seen as a means to calm traffic and to create convivial urban spaces. The evidence shows that local authorities in the UK and overseas are enthusiastic about shared space for its potential to enhance the urban realm. Vulnerable street users, such as vision-impaired people, do not share this enthusiasm. They perceive shared space as likely to bring them into increasing contact with motor vehicles, and as compromising their safety and well-being. Shared spaces are, potentially, what I refer to as auto-disabling environments. Referring to data from the UK, I develop the proposition that shared space can be characterised as ‘disembodied urban design’ that fails to capture the complexity of corporeal form and the manifold interactions of bodies-in-space. The disembodied understanding of the interactions between bodies, space, and movement, propagated by shared space design, (re)produces both existential insecurity and ontological uncertainty amongst certain categories of users, such as vision-impaired people. Shared space can be understood as a manifestation of disabling design in the built environment, and as a reaffirmation of disabled people's relative invisibility in relation to the crafting of designed spaces.

Purpose: The concept of universal design (UD) has acquired global significance and become orthodoxy of what is presented as the very best of design practice. This is despite limited evaluation of the theoretical content of the concept. This article seeks to redress this shortfall in knowledge by providing a critique of the theoretical and conceptual components that underpin the principles of universal design.Method: Commentary.Results: The content of UD appears to be reductive and functionalist, with an appeal to discourses of technical flexibility, or the notion that the problems confronting disabled people by poorly designed built environments may be redressed by recourse to technical and management solutions. UD is characterized by its advocation of the marketization of access as the primary means to ensure the accessibility of products, including the built environment. This has the potential to reduce the “right to access” to a right to be exercised through a market presence or transaction. There is also lack of clarity about what advocates of UD understand universalism to be, as illustrated by evidence of some ambivalence towards specialist or particular design solutions.Conclusions: UD provides a useful, yet partial, understanding of the interrelationships between disability and design that may limit how far inequalities of access to the built environment can be overcome.

Urban policy agendas are increasingly focused on the mobilization of active citizens and the propagation of cosmopolitan identities. This reflects a growing convergence between countries in urban policy thinking and practice, and greater uniformity in the terms and concepts that are used in different countries. This article draws on empirical evidence from Taipei, Taiwan to explore the form and character of changing urban policy agendas and their impacts on urban environments and communities. Taipei has undergone radical social, economic and political change in recent decades, and in the 2000s policymakers readily adopted the discourses of cosmopolitanism and community empowerment to legitimate major redevelopment projects. We develop the argument that this turn to cosmopolitanism lies at the heart of a paradox. On the one hand it is presented by policymakers as a radical, emancipatory programme that reflects wider shifts in the aspirations and expectations of increasingly active and globally oriented citizens. On the other hand, the term is used to underpin reactionary or conservative agendas that seek to sustain and extend existing power relations. The article argues that greater academic and policy attention needs to be given to the socially situated nature of cosmopolitanism and its characterizations in diverse contexts.Résumé: Les programmes des politiques urbaines se consacrent de plus en plus à la mobilisation de citoyens actifs et à la dissémination d’identités cosmopolites. Ils traduisent le fait que la pratique et la réflexion en matière de politiques urbaines se rejoignent d’un pays à l’autre, et que les modalités et concepts utilisés dans différents pays s’uniformisent progressivement. Cet article s’appuie sur des faits empiriques concernant Taipei (Taïwan) pour examiner la forme et la nature des programmes de politiques publiques de la ville, dans leur évolution et leurs impacts sur les communautés et environnements urbains. Taipei a connu une transformation sociale, économique et politique radicale sur les dernières décennies, et dans les années 2000, les décideurs politiques ont volontiers adopté les discours du cosmopolitisme et de l’autonomie des communautés afin de justifier d’importants projets de réaménagement. Or, cette orientation vers le cosmopolitisme se trouve au centre d’un paradoxe. D’un côté, les concepteurs de ces politiques la présentent comme un programme radical d’émancipation reflétant les bouleversements globaux dans les aspirations et attentes d’habitants toujours plus actifs et mondialisés. De l’autre, la terminologie sous‐tend des programmes réactionnaires ou conservateurs qui visent à nourrir et développer les relations de pouvoir existantes. Il faut donc que la recherche et les politiques publiques s’intéressent davantage à la nature socialement située du cosmopolitisme et à ses caractérisations dans divers contextes.

There is a plethora of regulation relating to building form and performance and, seemingly, much more emphasis on risk identification and its management, particularly in relation to the processes underpinning the development and delivery of building projects. It appears that the practices of architects, like other urban design professionals, are implicated in the construction of risky objects and their mitigation by recourse to systems of managerial governance. Drawing on survey and interview data, it is suggested that a new focus for the understanding of architecture, and urban design more generally, ought to be consideration of the interrelationships between creativity, risk and regulation. The paper describes and evaluates architects’ understanding of, and responses to, what they perceive to be increased exposure to risk (and its regulation) in the design process. The paper is built around the proposition that risk and its regulation are entwined with organisational changes in the nature of project development and delivery, and linked with the emergence of what might be regarded as diffused or dispersed organisational forms that in and of themselves become harbingers of risk while also being one of the means to create new forms of risk governance. In turn, many of architects’ responses to risk revolve around procedures to secure reputation in contexts where loss of standing and repute is perceived to be a significant threat.

(2008). The interrelationships between environment and disability. Local Environment: Vol. 13, THE ENVIRONMENT AND DISABILITY: MAKING THE CONNECTIONS, pp. 477-483.