How Cities Shape Our Experience

Abstract

Cities need to be places of inclusion, belonging, and access. Failing to do so leads to social and economic costs for citizens, such as the marginalization and exclusion of persons with disabilities and older persons from participating in important services and activities. The construction industry shapes our built environment and has a significant role to play in ensuring cities are places of inclusion and access to create a more equitable future for us all. However, current practices within the construction industry are failing to accommodate persons with disabilities and older persons. Inclusive practices in construction management require technical approaches that support project delivery. The construction industry can inform and support policy objectives, but it is lacking in its management approach to ensure accessibility for all. There is a need for integrated approaches that are embedded in the standard operating procedures of cities, companies, and the wider construction industry to absorb the costs of accessibility over the life cycle of building or infrastructure developments. City leaders and construction companies must engage local communities in participatory planning and share effective processes and best practices for incorporating accessibility principles into their projects.

The challenges of the new society are the challenges of the city. The majority of the world’s population already lives in cities and this proportion only continues to rise. Therefore, cities are places where all the challenges and contradictions of the social human system emerge. Cities are where we witness everything in its most exaggerated manner—all the different conflicts of society. Whether we are talking about the future of work or the future of the social contract, all of the big issues are perfectly represented in the new urban reality. (Joan Clos, Former Executive Director of UN Habitat, Former Mayor of Barcelona)

At the age of ten, three years after moving to the United States and my parents’ divorce, I was preparing to meet up with my father. I clearly remember my mother choosing New York City as the backdrop to this encounter. The physical and spatial embodiment of liberty, opportunity, and prosperity were values that my mother sought to highlight as she convinced my father that it was necessary to my development for our family to permanently move and set roots in Newport Beach, at the time one of the most accessible and affluent cities in California.

Through my mother’s insistence and geographical intention, I came to understand that cities are the embodiment of our values, a representation of a community’s collective imagination. Cities agglomerate people’s wants, needs, priorities, failures, and successes. By the time I reconnected with my father in New York that hot summer, I had already lived in or visited family in many diverse urban centers. Caracas, Geneva, Newport Beach, and Belgrade each held a piece of my home, each had roots, and each had meaning. Each hometown was so different. Each carried a legacy of what the community valued. Each was built, inhabited, used, and maintained in wildly different ways.

Most historians and social scientists treat cities as mere settings. In fact, urban places play a far greater role and are pivotal in shaping our experiences.¹ Each of the above cities shaped my own experience, my understanding of the world around me, and ultimately my understanding of myself. Each city (and its citizens) held different assumptions of who the city was built for and how I could function. In bigger cities daily life has a faster, artificial rhythm and, for good and ill, people and agencies affect each other through externalities (uncompensated effects) whose impact is inherently geographical.

Richard Harris (2021) addresses this by saying, “In economic terms, urban concentration enables efficiency and promotes innovation while raising the costs of land, housing, and labor. Socially, it can alienate or provide anonymity, while fostering new forms of community. It creates congestion and pollution, posing challenges for governance. Some effects extend beyond urban borders, creating cultural change.” The character of cities varies by country and world region, but it has generic qualities, a claim best tested by comparing places that are most different. These qualities intertwine, creating built environments that endure. To fully comprehend such path dependency, we need to develop a synthetic vision that is historically and geographically informed.

This is the urban century. Half of humanity already lives in towns and cities and it is projected that within the next 50 years, more than two-thirds of the planet’s population will be urbanized. Forecasts show the overall growth of the world’s population and the ongoing shift of people moving from rural to urban areas will add another 2.5 billion people to cities by 2050.² This rate of urbanization translates to more than 87 million people moving into cities each year. But of the 4 billion people globally living in cities, one third of them live in slums. The rapid pace in which people are moving into cities will force everyone from city leaders and urban planners to those of us who simply call cities home to consider the consequences of failing to provide healthy, safe, and accessible environments to all the current and future inhabitants of the world’s cities. Our understanding of the core values of cities and evolving priorities of average citizens are shaping the broader and farther-reaching array of choices we make about the cities we inhabit. These choices are more consequential now than at any time in history.

The Cost of Exclusion and the Power of Imaginary Cities

Cities have the potential to accelerate the main premise of this book, radical inclusion, and do so by unlocking human agency and shaping human flourishing.³ The ideas around human development, human agency, and human flourishing are vital to the way we imagine cities and construct civic life. Cities, towns, and human settlements shape our interactions and these interactions shape the way one fulfills one’s potential as a human being.

This is, first and foremost, a matter of justice. And the capabilities approach, developed under Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, provides a mechanism for measuring justice in terms of a place’s “ability to secure to citizens a list of central capabilities”⁴ (Nussbaum 2007, p. 281). Thinking in terms of capabilities allows for the assessment of whether a society is truly just and equal.

The ramifications of poor urban planning are severe. Poor urban planning exacerbates inequality through capability deprivations. Poor urban planning increases inequality by preventing some citizens from being able to fully participate in public life, while affording others with relative privileges by design. That people with disabilities, for example, are allowed to work in any given country means little if the streets prevent wheelchair users from accessing them, if buses are unable to accommodate them, if workplaces fail to provide appropriate sick leave, and so on. The same is true when considering all nature of rights and opportunities: the right to education, to marry, to have children, etc. Especially in very large cities located in developing countries, informal developments can increase the marginalization of resident populations by crowding people together, restricting mobility, and consequently depriving persons with disabilities their wellbeing, dignity, and the benefits of social and economic development on an equal basis with others. So far, poorly planned cities create a range of physical and digital barriers, limiting access to information and mobility options. They deprive human capabilities, increase vulnerability to environmental hazards, and exclude people from accessing services.

Human agency is one of the main reasons cities thrive but with the wrong approaches human agency (free laissez faire market approaches) can also accelerate and obstruct radical inclusion. Cities can set the rules and adopt standards that enhance human capabilities. Over the past few years (think of remote work) we have seen an immediate economic impact on the lives of their inhabitants (especially persons with significant disabilities who are returning to work in greater numbers). Urban policies and municipal services play a crucial role in unlocking human agency and in turn shaping human flourishing. Cities thus become testaments to their times and carry legacies as the physical manifestation of the social values of the period. For all their inhabitants, cities serve as centers of life, economic activity, and community. In fulfilling this role, cities become places of belonging and the inability to access your city indicates first and foremost that city leaders don’t believe you belong.⁵

How we think about cities and the people that inhabit them shape the way they are built and how they are used.⁶ What we choose to fund, build, demolish, and redesign indicates what we value and, if not properly done, can be detrimental to city dwellers’ life and human agency. Failing to retrofit old and inaccessible public transportation, for example, indicates that city leaders don’t believe that the mobility of the elderly and the disabled is a worthy priority.

Urban settlements on aggregate are better than rural settlements in affording diverse individual choices, and the capacity to act and interact with others (much different than themselves). Human flourishing goes beyond simply exercising choices with the aim of influencing the individual’s life conditions and chances. Human flourishing can be understood as an effort to find fulfillment and realize one’s individual potential in the context of a larger society, each with the right to do the same.⁷ While urbanization offers to unlock human potential as it brings forward economic and social benefits, it also brings significant demographic, political, and equity challenges. The development of new and expanded urban environments results in infrastructure, programs, and services with the capability to either enable or impede the participation of some members of society. These challenges must be overcome by ensuring that belonging is designed into cities as they evolve into the smart cities of tomorrow. There is a need for city leaders and planners to put in place policies and planning principles that ensure the most vulnerable people in society aren’t left behind.

Making Imaginary Cities Real

Well planned urban settlements afford their citizens access to economic opportunities, cultural experiences, and community, in large part due to the talents, resources, desires, and interests of individuals working together. What happens then, when the only way to access a city’s services is by owning and operating a car, or when getting fresh vegetables from a neighborhood market necessitates navigating around missing or broken sidewalks, or through unsafe roads or dangerous intersections? What does it mean when a city’s services, resources, or even technological advances leave behind those who could most benefit from them? Or perhaps, more importantly, how can we strengthen the capacities of cities to leave no one behind, to lock no one out of progress and success?

To answer these questions and realize the radical inclusion in cities of tomorrow, city officials, developers, planners, and regular citizens should consider the factors shaping cities now, from climate change, to urbanization, to the rise of global pandemics. In order to imagine what a safe, resilient, smart, and radically inclusive city could look like we have to understand why our concept of the city matters now more than any time in history.

In this chapter, I contend that cities matter because the future of humanity will be won or lost in cities, and specifically in the manner in which radical inclusion will shape the legacy of this urban century. This chapter will first explore why this is delving into what it means for a city to be a place of inclusion, belonging, and access, but more importantly we will explore the social and economic costs of cities that fail to work for their citizens by exploring how the ubiquity of urban barriers deprive persons with disabilities⁸ and older persons of their fundamental rights, and further marginalize or exclude large segments of the population from participating equally in health services, employment, education, or social protective services. This chapter concludes with a few key points on how and why to apply radically inclusive strategies in the urban century. It will also explore how major crises, such as a global health pandemic, can impact the functioning of cities and the services they provide for the world’s billions of urban residents.

The Influence and Shortcomings of the Construction Industry

The construction industry plays an important role in helping to shape a more equitable urban future. In fact, construction was one of the first businesses that humans developed. We are largely reliant on it for our accommodation, places of work, transportation, and recreation. The built environment is constructed in a great part by the practices, values, norms, and operating guidelines of the construction industry. But the current set of standardized processes within the construction industry is failing persons with disabilities and older persons. The impact of this failure continues to carry significant costs to all stakeholders interested in building a more inclusive and sustainable urban future.

Construction management is a discipline of practices and processes that enable the delivery of projects, programs, and entire elements (like neighborhoods, economic zones, and infrastructure) of the built environment. Construction management can be regarded as the practical application and convergence of policy intentions (economic, social, and political) and delivers elements of such policies in the built environment. For older persons and persons with disabilities, inclusive practices in construction management require technical approaches that support overall project delivery. It is an essential professional service that has extensive connections to other subject fields such as planning, design, and operation within the built environment sector.

The construction industry can inform and support policy objectives and design specifications (such as Universal Design) by engaging fully in the planning, design, and pre-construction process with all stakeholders. The construction industry can share field and project management experience in the design, constructability, and usability of important accessibility features and design standards in construction, design, and delivery of vital public infrastructure.

Construction management is the important process that considers both the macro and micro sphere of the entire lifecycle of the built environment. The macro sphere of construction management covers issues at the national or international level such as industry statistics, analysis, and projections on codes and standards, building information management, procurement and contracts, supply networks, workforce productivity, and workplace health and safety. The micro sphere of construction management considers specific issues related to the delivery of projects such as feasibility studies, cost plans, design justification, process schedules, risk assessments, quality and traceability assurance, productivity analysis, service level agreements, and post occupancy evaluation.⁹

But one area where construction management is severely lacking at both the macro and micro sphere level is a management approach that is inclusive of all people—no matter their age or functional limitations—and of the legal mandates to ensure that spaces are accessible and useful to the public. There is no explicit mention of “managing” accessibility in the construction management process. For major infrastructure developments, the operation and maintenance costs (commonly referred to as O&M) over the lifetime of an asset is in the range of 40–80 percent of the initial construction costs to build the asset. While the O&M costs accrue over many years or decades after completion of the initial build, these O&M cost components are largely determined early on, during the design and engineering phase.

Nevertheless, no one is taking ownership of accessibility in this space and as a consequence many costly and mission critical mistakes are occurring. While designing in accessibility costs around 2 percent of total design and construction cost, a retrofit can increase construction costs from 10–200 percent of original costs. There is a criminal lack of management experience and oversight. If we don’t intentionally manage inclusion in construction management, we accidentally reproduce exclusion, we reproduce barriers, we reproduce gaps and costly mistakes.

Asset Management and Participatory Planning

Asset managers are assigned to manage the costs of maintenance for each city asset, so in the case of a new public precinct development this might include park benches, lampposts, cross walks, curb cuts, public buildings, and all other assets within these public buildings. Asset managers also develop or oversee the development of recommendations on prioritized strategic maintenance and capital project programs for city infrastructure using historical, current use, condition, replacement cost, maintenance costs, and other data consistent with asset management principles and best practices. They also ensure the safety of these assets and the work carried out, yet do not monitor the accessibility of these assets.

Asset management refers to a planned approach for managing and investing in a municipality’s infrastructure. But in the status quo, this doesn’t extend to incorporating accessibility. As anticipated above, incorporating accessibility from the outset and addressing all phases of the project life cycle should be viewed as a vital risk mitigation and cost saving measure for cities committed to accessibility and inclusion. By including accessibility in the initial design considerations rather than adding them as an afterthought, this ensures an integrated approach to the final usability and long-term impact of the project that benefits people through the human life cycle of all ages and abilities.

So the term, “build it in, don’t bolt it on,” has real significance to efficient infrastructure design and construction. This point took center stage at a recent discussion with the head of asset management in the Department of Municipalities and Transport of Abu Dhabi, where we realized that this was a big opportunity; a way to understand assets in an entirely new way. A way to also assess the costs of exclusion and the cost savings of accessible products and accessible assets.

In every construction project there are trade-offs. Neither physical infrastructure nor the construction industry exist in the theoretical space of policy, but in the nuts and bolts, where the rubber meets the road. There will always be difficult decisions to make in terms of design specifications, budgets, operations, supply chains, access reviews, project timelines, staffing, and usability testing. However, an integrated approach that is embedded in the standard operating procedures of the city, company, or industry allows costs such as those associated with designing in accessibility to be absorbed and amortized over the life cycle of a project.

City planners, leaders, and the companies that construct our urban infrastructure and environments must engage local communities via participatory planning to ensure ongoing community involvement initiatives during the planning and design stage of urban developments. Major companies working in the construction industry need to cooperate with one another to share effective processes and best practices that lead to efficient and effective incorporation of accessibility principles. A good example of this is the Considerate Constructors Scheme, which is a nonprofit, independent organization founded by the United Kingdom’s construction industry to share stakeholder engagement, accessibility, and sustainability best practices.

There is a clear opportunity here, as the construction industry is notoriously slow to adopt many of the latest technological and social innovations that have been far more rapidly integrated into other industries. So as the construction industry is still evolving to take onboard the opportunities presented by digital transformation and new technologies such as 3D printing, there is also scope for the industry to embed accessibility processes in the same manner that safety considerations have been integrated into the construction management process in the past. Each of these trends could have a massive impact on increasing participation and inclusion of persons with disabilities and older persons into daily life. There is still much progression and maturity yet to occur in the industry, so our time is now. Those leaders and early adopters that successfully operationalize accessibility and inclusion will have the opportunity to shape industry wide standards that everyone else will follow.

How the Pandemic Highlighted the Need for Integrated Approaches

The pandemic has highlighted gaps of legislation, public policies, and effective measures. It has highlighted lack of accessibility to hospitals, health care, and information. During quarantine there was lack of access to food and essential services and difficulties in the exercise of human rights such as education and work. The solution to these problems is universal accessibility. (Maria Soledad Cisternas Special Envoy of the UN Secretary-General on Disability and Accessibility)

Much has been written about the pandemic’s impact on urban planning. The pandemic accelerated existing trends such as increasing rates of urbanization, digital transformation, climate change, and the inadequacy of our global health systems.¹⁰ As my friend Emilia Saiz, Secretary General of United Cities and Local Governments, likes to remind me, “Cities are on the front lines of global development, this is more evident each day, we cannot solve global challenges without more integrated local approaches. The ways in which we develop solutions matter now more than ever. The COVID-19 pandemic, including the responses to it, demonstrated a serious threat to global health, the provision of city services, and the livelihood and wellbeing of billions.” Findings from the Equity and Access Learning Series, co-organized by UCLG, GIZ, and World Enabled found that containment measures themselves actually threatened the lives of some of the nearly 550 million persons with disabilities and older persons that live in urban areas when for instance many people became cut off from access to vital home or specialist health services. The imposed limitations on mobility, participation, expression, and social interactions had unprecedented political, economic, and social implications.

The COVID-19 outbreak was a universal global phenomenon, yet saw a wide range of responses. All countries were forced to prepare, respond, and recover, but each did so in a different way. However, for cities and towns in low- and middle-income countries, the pandemic presented a greater challenge due to weaker health care systems and lack of social safety nets. These challenges were amplified again for cities that host large populations of refugees and displaced people, either living in camps or squatting in slums and low-income settlements in urban areas. The large metro regions in the United States faced similar challenges, such as in New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles where the hardest hit neighborhoods consisted predominantly of low-income Black and Latino residents.

The forces that control the ability for people to participate in their cities and people’s wellbeing in general have also been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.¹¹ It has exposed areas of weakness within institutions and services that become absolute priorities for people facing immediate concerns. The pandemic presented us with a range of responses in different cities around the world, some that proved far more successful than others. It also presented us with the opportunity to decide what our new normal is—do we simply want to go back to how things were before?

Many of the impacts of the pandemic caused distortions to background urbanization trends by altering the population growth rates or the areas where people wanted to reside. In the United States, there was a marked decrease in urban growth, evident by 39 out of 48 core counties in major US metropolitan areas showing lower population growth in 2019–20 than in 2018–19.^12,13 This population slowdown in major metropolitan areas was partially due to deaths, lower birth rates, decreased immigration from abroad, and out-migration of existing residents. More wealthy people chose to leave the cities for the suburbs, especially as remote working possibilities were broadened. At the same time, a high proportion of immigrants were entering cities. Remote working opportunities throughout the pandemic have worsened the gap between wealthy and low-income workers, contributing to higher rates of COVID-19 infections in low-income communities. The Economic Policy Institute found that 61 percent of workers in the highest income quartile had access to remote work opportunities, compared to just 9 percent of workers in the lowest income quartile.¹⁴

In addition to remote working, some of the most important trends that have emerged during the pandemic and in response to the crisis include an increased strain on digital infrastructure and reduced data privacy for citizens. It has also seen greater growth of local decentralized systems and networks, support for open innovation, and a shift to participatory, virtual cultural experiences. By recognizing the emergence of these trends and taking measures to understand their likely impacts, it is possible to integrate the positives that they may provide in the post-COVID world. Accelerated digital transformations as a consequence of meeting the demands of the pandemic can be used as a tool for creating more inclusive cities.

The large element of the unknown and need for rapid response created situations in cities around the world where various trial and error type approaches were taken and encouraged greater innovation in response protocols. We know that this won’t be the last pandemic nor the last crisis that cities around the world will face. Therefore there is a strong need for the future-proofing of our cities against these types of major disruptions. But by measuring the impacts of various strategies and protocols, retaining what works and discarding what doesn’t, it allows cities and individuals to maintain a spirit of continuous and permanent innovation that can help us rebuild our cities and societies to be more resilient and more inclusive in the future.

Challenges and Opportunities in Building Belonging by Design

It is time to stop allowing ourselves to be characterized as vulnerable. As liabilities in emergencies and disasters. Vulnerability is due to failures in providing accessibility in the built environment, failures in providing effective communications access, and failures in emergency and disaster programs. (Marcie Roth, CEO of World Institute on Disability, Former Director for Disability, Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA))

The pandemic was an unprecedented collective moment. Many city leaders that I spoke to understood the importance of the immediacy of collective decision-making. To support them, the organization I run, World Enabled, created an unprecedented pandemic response program that linked city leaders via WhatsApp groups. Over 25,000 resources were shared over 24 months. A network of over 2000 advocates and civic leaders were able to share what was working in real time. They were collectively learning how to construct the new normal. They were rapidly prototyping inclusive pandemic responses, and in the process—shaping the future.

The stigma against persons with disabilities that characterizes us as vulnerable was one of the most dangerous elements of the pandemic. Throughout the pandemic, the fact that health officials made decisions regarding the rationing of medical and other supplies based on who was deemed most valuable was highly problematic. According to an article entitled, “Disability Discrimination, Medical Rationing and COVID-19” the reported rise in the number of “do not resuscitate” orders being imposed on people with disabilities has “caused particular concerns from a human rights perspective.”¹⁵ in New York and Kansas, for example, medical providers received guidelines indicating that ventilators should be removed “from people using them for a chronic condition who are judged lower priority, in order to give them to other individuals.”¹⁶ These types of decisions disregard the safety and autonomy of disabled people who rely on ventilators for chronic health conditions and demonstrate how the lives of non-disabled people are prioritized over those with disabilities. Similarly, a National Public Radio investigation found that throughout the pandemic, disabled and elderly people in Oregon were repeatedly denied ventilators and pressured to sign Do Not Resuscitate orders.¹⁷ Decisions like this, which are made on the assumption that persons with disabilities and older people are inherently vulnerable and necessarily have lower quality of life, are both extraordinarily common and extremely dangerous.

The intersection of poverty and inequality is most evident and visible in cities. Therefore targeted policies and actions are needed to respond to such impacts. Especially for the most vulnerable. These policies need to be data-driven, including disaggregated data on persons with disabilities so that responses can be developed that have fully considered data on barriers and improving accessibility. The current trend in the world of statistics is to rely on technology to administer survey questions, rather than using humans in the field. We know that people with disabilities and the elderly are far less likely to be able to access the technology that would enable them to respond to online surveys or telephone surveys. This means that even disaggregated data on persons with disabilities may fail to include the experiences of many disabled people. Groups involved in these processes are urged to work closely with disabled persons’ and older persons’ organizations so that researchers may understand more effective ways to collect data on these groups. This further ensures their perspectives are taken into account when determining which responses need to be prioritized.

When persons with disabilities have full access and are included at the table before, during, and after disasters, they can be contributors and true assets to community readiness and resilience. When we all work together to help persons with disabilities with their health, safety, dignity, and independence, it is not only good for individuals, it also optimizes community resources. Persons with disabilities are mindful of disaster related mistakes of the past, especially those that have disproportionately impacted them and older persons. Participation is key. The public sector can lead but that leadership alone is not enough to save lives. The focus needs to be placed on ensuring that when it comes to emergencies and disasters, as well as every other aspect of community and city life, the stance of “nothing about us without us” is applied.

What we know though is that the COVID-19 pandemic won’t be the last crisis of this scale. There is therefore a strong need to focus on future-proofing cities so we are better able to protect and assist people in the future, especially those most at risk. We must address issues such as the stigma around persons with disabilities as vulnerable—how will this play out in a future crisis? And how can greater inclusion of persons with disabilities in planning increase readiness and resilience?

Persons with disabilities hold a privileged vantage point in understanding and dealing with crises. They are masters of problem solving and are a special asset to be deployed and empowered. Containment measures such as social distancing are in some cases impractical or even impossible to comply with for persons with disabilities or older persons who may rely on assistance and support for the fulfillment of their daily needs.

It is therefore necessary that measures be taken to help protect the rights and livelihoods of persons with disabilities and older persons living in urban areas during emergencies or pandemics. Five of the key areas across which this needs to occur are:

• Advocacy to mainstream disability inclusion into all aspects of urban planning, especially in regard to climate change, public health, digital transformation, and migration.

• Networking to create an ecosystem approach that empowers agencies to learn and share what works. Networks encourage greater coordination between cities and stakeholders and break siloed thinking.

• Capacity building to strengthen people’s understanding, skills, and abilities to respond to the emerging threats and shape the transformation agenda within their city. All stakeholders including local governments, industry, and civil society organizations could benefit from widespread learning and training programs on accessibility and inclusion. These training programs should include data, monitoring, and evaluation metrics to better plan and implement effective, sustainable, and inclusive policies and programs.

• Technical assistance to ensure that local governments consult and partner with outside expert groups with a track record of success. These experts should include stakeholders with lived experience and deep technical knowledge of access and inclusion.

• Inclusion champions within all the national and local government agencies. These are people who are empowered to advocate for and build inclusive and accessible cities. These inclusion champions should include persons with disabilities as they are able to offer invaluable perspectives, know-how, resources, and expertise that has a genuine sense of clarity and purpose.

The points above should be understood as fundamental to building inclusion by design. Any governance or transformation plan in a city should center inclusion as a strategic and operational priority across all agencies. Although these insights emerged through pandemic response and recovery they were present throughout the US agencies in different ways.¹⁸ It is evident that they in fact will also become foundational pillars of the new normal. The new normal will give civic leaders and city officials a new sense of purpose, unlock new expertise, and generate a greater level of pride through achieving better outcomes and enabling greater ownership by all stakeholders.

What Is the New Normal?

The normal wasn’t normal. The normal wasn’t good. We don’t want to go back to that. It’s revealing so much about the vulnerabilities and problems in our system. (Marina Gorbis, Executive Director, Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future)

The face of the planet is changing as the cities we live in change around us. Public spaces are being redefined and reimagined. Streets are being reclaimed from cars and unused public land is being repurposed for recreational use. But many of the changes occurring within cities continue to be problematic such as rapidly rising costs of living (including energy, transportation, food, and basic services). In addition, the pandemic saw an acceleration of mental illness, increased levels of violence, especially gender-based violence and violence against persons with disabilities, as well as an acceleration of inequality. When inequality persists, it stratifies societies for generations to come (Figs. 4.1 and 4.2).

Fig. 4.1

Stevenson Square, Manchester, UK. Visual description: Diners eating at picnic tables placed in the street during the temporary “pedestrianization” of Stevenson Square to allow for more social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Source: David Dixon, April 13, 2021)

Fig. 4.2

St. Mark’s Place, New York City. Visual description: Outdoor diners enjoy their meals in temporary shelters designed to allow restaurant-goers to eat outside while sheltered from the elements. These structures occupy part of the roadway, demonstrating how cities can reimagine street design for pedestrians. (Image credit: Eden, Janine and Jim, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dining_on_St._Marks_Place_(50295553313).jpg)

In the case of humanitarian emergencies such as the war in Ukraine or the impacts of health pandemics, crises tend to amplify what we already know. And persons with disabilities are among those at greatest risk.¹⁹ For example in Chicago, 35 percent of persons with disabilities live below the poverty line, compared to 12 percent of those without disabilities. When a crisis occurs, the already fragile systems fray under increased pressure, as was seen with issues of availability of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in many cities and countries. Other highly visible impacts witnessed around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic included loss of access to housing and transportation options being reduced or completely cut off. There are also human rights issues at stake, where the rights of persons with disabilities are infringed upon in relation to communication access and education rights when schools are closed. The impact of social distancing was also exacerbated for persons with disabilities who are often interdependent on others.

However, there have been positive impacts too. Cities like Amsterdam, Abu Dhabi, Bogota, Barcelona, and others have adapted to new realities by advocating and improving technologies and norms that were already favored by many persons with disabilities. This included the deployment of fully captioned virtual meetings, flexible work arrangements, grocery and food deliveries, home delivered meals, universal basic income trials, telemedicine, and a renewed interest in accessible design (e.g., via touchless fare gates and automatic door openings to help mitigate virus transmission). New relationships were forged between NGOs and government entities and disability and non-disability human service organizations working more closely together toward common goals. And new ways of communicating with communities were implemented that established new and more effective long-term processes and strategies.

Other trends evident during the pandemic included land use changes. Mixed-use real estate developments that combine residences, offices, hotels, and shops have previously had success in regenerating surrounding urban districts. COVID-19, however, created challenges for conventional operations of shops and restaurants, which in turn created difficulties for mixed-use developments. Adhering to social distancing may lead to a significant increase in car usage, reversing declines in the demand for automobile travel with long-term negative environmental repercussions. Building back better, cities must recognize the ethical imperative for a fairer distribution of urban amenities. This includes more accessible space, more space allocated to bikes and pedestrians, and more green spaces.

When it comes to deciding what we want the new normal to look like, we must seize the opportunity to rebuild our cities post-COVID so that their citizens and institutions are resilient to future shocks. Changes to working habits to favor remote working can be harnessed to make remote working an accessibility tool. Similarly, greater use of grocery and food deliveries can broaden and make permanent accessible services and infrastructure to assist persons with disabilities or older persons to have greater access to the goods and services they require. Changes to the use of outdoor space such as restaurant and outdoor dining areas can be used to rethink the amount of land prioritized for cars, turning inner city roads and carparks into car-free public or commercial spaces used to boost recreational or financial opportunities. These types of approaches allow us to take the opportunity to use changes that are occurring to alter the course of the greater physical and digital transformations already underway in our cities.

Putting the New Normal into Practice

Persons with disabilities and older persons make up more than a quarter of the world’s population. The COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, migration, war, and humanitarian emergencies all pose direct threats to human rights and it is evident that responses and strategies put in place to deal with recent emergencies of this kind too often fail to achieve their intended outcomes.

The compounding nature of these crises places additional focus on the role of city leaders and local governments, who are responsible for the implementation of new guidelines, processes, and norms. Unless they can deploy new capabilities and generate new insights they will be condemned to the status quo. And unless we can measure what matters most (and understand the data we need), we will continue to create systems and processes that miss the mark on access and inclusion.

In this chapter, we discussed how cities have the potential to accelerate radical inclusion, by shaping the way citizens fulfill their potential. Below is a list of strategies and measures that can be taken by local governments to ensure a radically inclusive approach is used to design policies, services, and cities themselves. These measures should aim to:

• Promote inclusion and accessibility strategies that are a cross-cutting theme in urban governance and management.

• Enhance the training and continuous learning of city officials through specialized communities of practice and the exchange of knowledge and best practices between cities.

• Ensure that all urban transformation plans and policies are disability-inclusive, including through consultation and partnerships with persons with disabilities.

• Advance climate change responses that are participatory and inclusive of people with disabilities and that center on social resilience and equity.

• Prepare and disseminate targeted communications addressing necessary social responses to crises or emerging issues. These must include providing the community and vulnerable groups with actionable information so they can continue to make informed decisions.

• Deliver public information in accessible formats—with public communication messaging that is bias-free and respectful of all population groups, including persons with disabilities.

• Continue to build on commitments for persons with disabilities in education, digital development, data collection, transportation, and social protection.

• Promote inclusive technologies, the deployment of broadband for underserved communities, and the provision of community-based training and upskilling programs.

• Provide continued access to all goods and services, including disability-specific support services, necessary for safeguarding the wellbeing of persons with disabilities in all emergency response situations.

In conclusion, it is clear that the rapid pace of urbanization and increasing number of people living in cities has significant consequences for the health, safety, and accessibility of our urban environments. Poor urban planning can lead to inequality and exclusion, depriving certain groups of their capabilities and depriving them of their full potential as human beings. However, cities also have the potential to accelerate radical inclusion by unlocking human agency and shaping human flourishing. In the next chapter, we will explore how we can both make and measure progress in creating radically inclusive cities that provide opportunities and promote justice for all inhabitants.

Callout Box—News Article

• RampMyCity, a startup making cities more able for the disabled

• Source: The Hindu

Consider This

RampMyCity is an accessibility startup looking to make inclusivity go beyond just infrastructural change. Started in 2018 as a simple appeal to get restaurants accessible for wheelchair users, RampMyCity now has made mainstream places of public usage like workplaces, residential societies, schools, colleges, public parks, police stations, ATMs, supermarkets, places of sports and leisure, eateries, hotels, and government buildings accessible by providing simple infrastructural solutions that carry a massive societal impact. RampMyCity also drives inclusivity by conducting sessions where hands-on training and awareness programs are given to employees and staff of various organisations to help progress attitudes, behaviors, and thought processes around persons with a disability.

The success of startups like RampMyCity, highlight the importance of expanding the solutions to accessibility and inclusion beyond government to include the capabilities and capacity of individuals and private organizations. This is especially the case in developing countries where access to public funding or public led initiatives on accessibility can be lacking. By helping to provide infrastructure solutions and conducting sessions to sensitize and train employees on disability inclusion, startups such as RampMyCity are helping to create more inclusive environments that allow greater numbers of people to access mainstream places of public usage and have equal opportunities to participate in social, cultural, recreational, and economic activities. This not only benefits persons with disabilities, but also helps to promote a more inclusive and equal society as a whole.