Building Cities for All: Amplifying Advocacy, Access, and Equity in the Urban Century

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.