Auto-disabilities: the case of shared space environments
AbstractMany 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. Keywords: disability, embodiment, mobilities, social exclusion, urban design
Download InfoIf you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Bibliographic InfoArticle provided by Pion Ltd, London in its journal Environment and Planning A.
Volume (Year): 44 (2012)
Issue (Month): 9 (September)
Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://www.pion.co.uk
You can help add them by filling out this form.
reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.Access and download statisticsgeneral information about how to correct material in RePEc.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Neil Hammond).
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.