Abstract
Urban planners in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries viewed disability as a deficit to cure or a blight to erase. As a result, the built environment in the twenty-first century excludes, marginalizes, and invalidates the lived experience and basic dignities of 550 million people with disabilities that live in cities or urban settlements.
This chapter centers its analysis on the too often overlooked linkage between urban planning misplaced notions of space, justice, and sociality and their repercussions in the genesis and evolving experience of disability advocacy. The latter, in turn, by responding to and resisting these notions, eventually transformed and reshaped them. After a brief overview of the early urban planners’ conceptualization of space and sociality, the chapter displays historical examples from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thus illuminating the often neglected experiences of disability advocacy in urban policy, planning, and design. In doing so, the authors try to show how early advocates set into motion practices to remedy past failures of urban planning which altered the social and spatial reality of future generations. What emerges is a legacy of resistance that in the late twentieth century fundamentally transformed the social and spatial conceptions of liberty and justice for all.
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Notes
- 1.
This work is meant as a preliminary introduction and as such draws from various sources, across various cities, during the formative years of the planning profession in the United States to the present time.
- 2.
We understand that there is considerable debate within the disability community on the usage of person-first versus identity-first language to describe the experience and identity of disability. For the purposes of this chapter, we have chosen to alternate between person-first and identity-first language, using both the terms disabled people and people with disabilities in our writing.
- 3.
Section 504 is a federal law designed to protect the rights of individuals with disabilities in programs and activities that receive Federal financial assistance from the U.S. Department of Education (ED). Section 504 provides: “No otherwise qualified individual with a disability in the United States … shall, solely by reason of her or his disability, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
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Pineda, V.S., Catalano, S.L., Sorensen, E. (2023). Building Cities for All: Amplifying Advocacy, Access, and Equity in the Urban Century. In: Rioux, M.H., Viera, J., Buettgen, A., Zubrow, E. (eds) Handbook of Disability. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1278-7_10-1
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