By Terri O'Hare
A few years ago, a French energy company developed a TV spot that made the rounds of disabled advocates’ blogs as a quicktime movie. It shows a city scene packed with people. One man stands out: he walks slowly, carefully observing those around him. As the camera pulls back, we see he’s surrounded by pedestrians using wheelchairs, some walking with canes and guide dogs, some using sign language to converse with friends. He’s apparently the only non-disabled person in the city. The spot imaginatively conveyed the “otherness” people with disabilities experience as they negotiate most American cities, large or small. What’s making the rounds these days in disability advocates’ blogs, and also in noted urban listservs, is a debate over universal design”—which “celebrates human differences across the spectrum of age, gender, race, culture, and ability,” according to one popular definition, formulated by Elaine Ostroff of the Boston-based nonprofit, Adaptive Environments. Sustainability and green design are, hands down, two of the hottest trends in urban design. As an element of longterm sustainability, universal design—in other words, creating buildings that are accessible to everyone—is also gaining traction and attention.
The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 requires designers to create, among other things, wheelchair-accessible entrances to public buildings. Recent debates have grown to include the design of consumer products and, increasingly, private homes. The problem is, even some New Urbanists, known for inclusive, community-making approaches to city planning and architecture, disagree about how to incorporate universal design principles into their projects. For example, earlier this year on the University of Georgia’s Pro-Urb listserv (dedicated to “the practice of New Urbanism”), one California architect wrote, “I hate the notion of killing off buildings that work well for a lot of people just because they don’t work well for everyone… If access is a civil right, then all buildings that deny the delivery of that right should be adapted or demolished. Pick the wrong legal framework for a regulation, and there will be lots of unintended consequences.” Andres Duany, a Yale-educated architect who co-founded the Congress for the New Urbanism, chimed in in support: “We will become a nation exclusively of elevator apartment buildings and the single-level ranch house. Townhouses will be impossible, as will small buildings in general (the elevator must be amortized over many apartments). Tight frontage urbanism of the kind that creates Georgetown, Charleston, New Orleans, Manhattan, San Francisco (and all the rest of the best) will be eliminated.” A Georgia Tech professor fired back: “At some point when enlightenment strikes radical concepts like New Urbanism,and universal design is the rule rather than the exception, the ADA guidelines will no longer be needed.”
Whatever the outcome of such debates, the importance of inclusive design is dawning on cities. In 2001, UPS teamed up with the National Organization on Disability to offer a $25,000 prize to the most “disability-friendly” city in the country. Sixty-five cities applied, and the first winner was Venice, Florida, which has a 100-percentaccessible bus system for riders, and also scored points for printing its local election ballots in large print and Braille. Irvine, California, Pasadena, West Hollywood, Phoenix, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Austin have all won in the years since, and now the prizes have grown to $35,000, since Wal-Mart also stepped in as a sponsor. Last year’s runner-up, Chicago, got extra kudos for being “one of the few cities in the nation to offer free telephone consultation and plan review to architects” and others, on how to incorporate the ADA and other accessibility principles. In 2005, Chicago’s Millennium Park received the Paralyzed Veterans of America award for its barrier-free design. Now, the AARP and National Association of Homebuilders have started a “Livable Communities” award, for designs that make life easier for the elderly.
The city of Santa Fe, New Mexico, struggled to incorporate the ADA into its already strict architecture codes more than fifteen years ago, but now the city and state are making progress. “We’re seeing creative results from improved awareness and raining,” says Hope Reed, an architectural compliance specialist for the state of New Mexico. “When we started here in the early 1990s with the Draft ADA, there was a lot of arguing in meetings and shouting, even. Building code administrators, architects, people with disabilities, and home builders, would get together to review the ADA for inclusion in our New Mexico Building Code 1991 (NMBC), and it would get very heated. Now the meetings are more cooperative… there have been improvements to understanding and interpreting the law.” For Michael Graves, an architect and designer whose firm has designed more than 300 buildings— from the Humana Building in Louisville, Kentucky, to the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport in The Hague—the debate over designing for disabilities recently shifted from theory to reality. He became partially paralyzed in 2003 from a virus that destroyed nerves in his spinal cord. Graves now uses a power wheelchair to move through his daily routine. His 100-employee firm, with offices in New York and New Jersey, has formed a new branch, Solutions, to focus on product design for adaptive equipment.
Graves now has a slightly different perspective on the debate between New Urbanists and disability advocates: “The responsibility cannot just be on the architecture. The onus is also on our side to design equipment that can better access buildings,” he says. “Before my injury, my approach to the ADA was like others in the profession: do as much as the law required. When I taught at Princeton, I used to ask students to consider what Michelangelo would create if the ADA had been around then. St. Peter’s is glorious, and steps belong in the front, as long as I can enter the building somewhere.”
