ABSTRACT

Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader takes a groundbreaking approach to exploring the interconnections between disability, architecture and cities. The contributions come from architecture, geography, anthropology, health studies, English language and literature, rhetoric and composition, art history, disability studies and disability arts and cover personal, theoretical and innovative ideas and work.

Richer approaches to disability – beyond regulation and design guidance – remain fragmented and difficult to find for architectural and built environment students, educators and professionals. By bringing together in one place some seminal texts and projects, as well as newly commissioned writings, readers can engage with disability in unexpected and exciting ways that can vibrantly inform their understandings of architecture and urban design.

Most crucially, Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader opens up not just disability but also ability – dis/ability – as a means of refusing the normalisation of only particular kinds of bodies in the design of built space. It reveals how our everyday social attitudes and practices about people, objects and spaces can be better understood through the lens of disability, and it suggests how thinking differently about dis/ability can enable innovative and new kinds of critical and creative architectural and urban design education and practice.

chapter |5 pages

Introduction

part I|44 pages

Histories/narratives

chapter 1|278 pages

Disabling the flâneur

chapter 3|9 pages

A critical condition

chapter 4|251 pages

Lying down anyhow

Disability and the rebel body

part II|248 pages

Theory and criticism

chapter 6|10 pages

Disability aesthetics

chapter 7|228 pages

The body as a problem of individuality

A phenomenological disability studies approach

chapter 8|220 pages

Designing collective access

A feminist disability theory of universal design

chapter 9|14 pages

More than access

Overcoming limits in architectural and disability discourse

chapter 10|12 pages

From steep steps to retrofit to universal design, from collapse to austerity

Neo-liberal spaces of disability

part III|190 pages

Education

chapter 11|13 pages

Including architecture

What difference can we make?

chapter 13|149 pages

Un/shared space

The dilemma of inclusive architecture

chapter 14|9 pages

The collapsing lecture

part IV|52 pages

Technologies/materialities

chapter 16|4 pages

The prosthetic imagination

Enabling and disabling the prosthesis trope

chapter 17|109 pages

Electric moms and quad drivers

People with disabilities buying, making and using technology in postwar America

chapter 18|96 pages

Pissing without pity

Disability, gender and the public toilet

chapter 19|8 pages

Disability and the promises of technology

Technology, subjectivity and embodiment within an order of the normal

part V|52 pages

Projects and practices

chapter 20|6 pages

Deaf space

chapter 21|63 pages

Along disabled lines

Claiming spatial agency through installation art

chapter 22|11 pages

The Ramp House

Building inclusivity

chapter 23|6 pages

Resistant sitting