Cripping disability engagement: a path forward for accessibility advisory committees


Alfiya Battalova, Royal Roads University

Historically, the municipal spaces have been sites of colonial practices characterized by the erasure of the bodyminds that were deemed unfit for the emerging urban environment. The principle of Nothing About Us Without Us (Charlton, 2000) has recently become more prevalent in the discussions of including the expertise and the lived experiences of people with disabilities. Similarly, planning and municipal governance have started acknowledging that our cities are on Indigenous lands, but beyond that basic recognition, municipalities still do a poor job of making space for Indigenous sovereignty, worldviews, processes, and protocols in the shared space of the city (Bouvier and Walker, 2018). The engagement is often tokenistic and restricted by the institutional frameworks of the municipal governance. The similar restrictions apply to disabled people who have been denied the right to the city. The introduction of the provincial accessibility legislation in British Columbia in 2021 has mandated the creation of accessibility advisory committees in municipalities. But the structures set up to promote participation create an illusion of inviting citizens with disabilities to participate in decision-making, but the range of participants and level of participation is limited by policymakers (Joiner, 2006). In a context where participation operates within policy prescription, the systemic barriers to meaningful participation are perpetuated (Edwards, 2008). People with disabilities express the importance of not only being able to articulate what matters to them but also whether the processes in place are meaningful, what their experiences being in these public spaces feel like, and whether they promote a sense of belonging (Milner and Kelly, 2009; Restall and Kaufert, 2011). Using the critical perspectives from disability studies, urban studies, and Indigenous studies, and an abductive analysis of 32 qualitative interviews with disabled committee members and city staff, this paper will unpack what meaningful engagement and participation mean using the critical disability and decolonial approaches (e.g., storytelling) in urban planning. For example, one of the aspects of deliberative process is the presence of emotion and affect. Looking at emotions in deliberation enables us to see the tension between the individual and the collective dimension of emotional experience, which becomes reflected both in how knowledge is produced and in what qualifies this knowledge as relevant (Durnová, 2015). In addition, when working to understand and support the most vulnerable members in the communities, organizations must put in the labor of listening to reduce power differentials. By providing systematic approaches to listening for discord, dissent, and other potentially hard-to-hear perspectives, civic listening has the potential to help organizations begin difficult conversations rather than avoid them - to face realities they may have shied away from in the past (Capizzo and Feinman, 2022). As well, storytelling as a research method contributes to capturing the polyphony of different voices in the planning processes (Ortiz, 2023). In the context of disability, understanding better the role of spatial design in the production of ability/ disability means the everyday expertise of people with disabilities should be recognized as knowledge that goes beyond generalizing the experiences of disability through codes, guidelines, models and checklists and towards inhabiting spaces with people with disabilities in order to design with them (Rieger, 2023).

This paper will be presented at the following session: