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Universal Design (UD) is an approach to access to the built environment that goes beyond barrier-free design (Mace 1985). In short, built environments serve as litmus tests of broader social exclusions.
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#HOW DO I CHECK ACCESSIBILITY IN WORD 2013 PROFESSIONAL#
These movements and their professional counterparts showed that the design of buildings is not a value-neutral and passive act rather, the design of the built environment actively conditions and shapes the assumptions that the designers, architects, and planners of these value-laden contexts hold with respect to who will (and should) inhabit the world. Thus when any group that has been physically segregated or excluded protests its second-class status, its members are in effect challenging how architects practice their profession.Ī key contribution of late twentieth-century social movements to theories of architectural design is crystallized in the connections that these movements drew between physical environments and the social realities that they create. Although architects do not create these social categories, they play a key role in providing the physical framework in which the socially acceptable is celebrated and the unacceptable is confined and contained. … Valuable resources are given over to what is cherished-education, religion, commerce, family life, recreation-and tolerable symbols mask what is intolerable-illness, deviance, poverty, disability, old age. As architect Ray Lifchez wrote (1987, 1) in his groundbreaking Rethinking Architecture: Design Students and Physically Disabled People:īuilding forms reflect how a society feels about itself and the world it inhabits. The term barrier-free design emerged to describe the architectural strategies that underlie these legislative gains.īarrier-free design was not merely a legislative trope or expedient rather, the theory of barrier-free design supported efforts in the architectural profession to design environments according to the spatial needs and demands of women, people of color, and people with disabilities (Matrix 1984 Steinfeld 1979 Mace 1985 Weisman 1989 Welch and Jones 2002, 193). The efforts of these activists resulted in the passage of federal civil rights legislation that aspired to protect the access of people with disabilities to the built environment.
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Throughout the 1960s and 70s, disability activists physically occupied public buildings in order to demonstrate that law and society had failed to include them (Nielsen 2012, 168). Activists argued that inaccessible built environments-such as segregated lunch counters, workplaces without childcare, suburban single-family homes, and buildings with stairs and without ramps-made oppressed people less visible and, therefore, less likely to receive legislative protections (Steinfeld and Maisel 2012, 13-15). In the civil rights movement era, feminist and disability approaches to architectural design emerged to address the problems of spatial segregation. A conception of UD that is informed by a politics of interdependence and collective access would address the multiple intersectional forms of exclusion that inaccessible design produces. Furthermore, the paper examines ways in which to conceive UD as a project of collective access and social sustainability, rather than as a strategy targeted toward individual consumers and marketability. This paper uses feminist and disability theories of architecture and geography in order to complicate the concepts of "universal" and "design" and to develop a feminist disability theory of UD wherein design is a material-discursive phenomenon that produces both physical environments and symbolic meaning. Though UD is often taken for granted as synonymous with the best, most inclusive, forms of disability access, the values, methodologies, and epistemologies that underlie UD require closer scrutiny. Universal Design (UD) is a movement to produce built environments that are accessible to a broad range of human variation.