Inclusive Design: Why Wouldn’t You?

Mike Westley (Programme Manager)

It is estimated that fully 10 - 15% of Europe's population can be termed, ‘disabled’ or ‘excluded’. To put that in a slightly more manageable context it amounts to 37 million people in Europe alone.

This begs the question; rather than catering for millions worldwide as though they are a minority interest group, shouldn’t we be changing the way we design and manage our environments to make the inclusive agenda an indivisible part of any brief?

Recently, I was fortunate enough to talk with David Mackay the architect of the Olympic Village at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics when he visited Plymouth University's School of Architecture to talk about the nature of the contemporary city and the quality of life which it offers it citizens.

David made the point that for the site at Barcelona his brief was to design the Village specifically for the Paralympics which parallel the Olympic Games. In such a visionary city it is perhaps no surprise that the village was also required to provide a residential neighbourhood to become integrated into the city surrounding it when the games themselves had finished.

David is a long term resident and practitioner in the Catalan capital and has himself moved into the Village. Was there, I asked him, any sense of living in a ghetto for the disabled, was there a sense of ‘accessibility’ being overtly the quality of the place? Far from it, David informed me that it was becoming one of the hippest, most popular places to live in the city, and not just for people with disabilities. When I asked him why he thought this might be, he said that when he asked residents what they thought of the design of the neighbourhood; its buildings and public spaces, the transport system etc., they all said more or less the same thing; “why wouldn’t you design a community like this?”

“Why wouldn’t you…?” why design for exclusion, when we can instead design to create environments which are both inclusive of the needs of disabled, vulnerable and excluded groups within our society and crucially make richer more humane environments for everyone to enjoy.

The challenge is there for all designers, if the David Mackay’s of this world can show what's possible and the design conscious citizens of Barcelona can endorse the product, should’t we all raise our aspirations of what we consider the standard for any specification for living?

| Latest Newsletter | Articles A-Z | Articles by subject |