Disability and the city

the long version

This book explores one of the crucial contexts within which the marginal status of disabled people is experienced: the interrelationships between disability, physical access, and the built environment. The author explores some of the critical processes underpinning the social construction of disability as a state of marginalization in the built environment. These concerns are interwoven with a discussion of the state's changing role in defining, categorising, and reproducing 'states of disablement' for people with disabilities. Using a range of empirical material from the UK and the USA, the book documents how the environmental planning system in Britain attempts to address the inaccessibility of the built environment, and discusses how disabled people contest the constraints placed on their mobility.