Disability and the Open City

Abstract

For at least three decades, the issue of physical accessibility has been a focus of analysis amongst some spatial scientists, including geographers, urban planners and architects. Whilst such 'conventional' access studies have assumed an important role as policy evaluation/ critique, their theoretical significance has been extremely limited. The understanding of accessibility, and the highly contested set of policy fields that regulates this, would be deepened if a wider range of socio-political theory was used to examine these issues. This paper contributes to the social theorisation of access by critically exploring how the 'reflexive modernisation' thesis of Ulrich Beck might be applied to the geographical understanding of disablement. The paper demonstrates how Beck's theoretical framework can be used to enrich understanding of the genesis and mediation of inaccessibility.