Universalism, universal design and equitable access to the built environment

Abstract

Purpose: The concept of universal design (UD) has acquired global significance and become orthodoxy of what is presented as the very best of design practice. This is despite limited evaluation of the theoretical content of the concept. This article seeks to redress this shortfall in knowledge by providing a critique of the theoretical and conceptual components that underpin the principles of universal design.Method: Commentary.Results: The content of UD appears to be reductive and functionalist, with an appeal to discourses of technical flexibility, or the notion that the problems confronting disabled people by poorly designed built environments may be redressed by recourse to technical and management solutions. UD is characterized by its advocation of the marketization of access as the primary means to ensure the accessibility of products, including the built environment. This has the potential to reduce the “right to access” to a right to be exercised through a market presence or transaction. There is also lack of clarity about what advocates of UD understand universalism to be, as illustrated by evidence of some ambivalence towards specialist or particular design solutions.Conclusions: UD provides a useful, yet partial, understanding of the interrelationships between disability and design that may limit how far inequalities of access to the built environment can be overcome.

Implications for Rehabilitation

• Creating universally designed places is integral to rehabilitation.

• Approaches to universal design (UD) focus, primarily, on the development and application of technologies and techniques to ensure environments are accessible. UD appears to be a technology-led movement.

• Users’ socio-cultural attitudes and values, in shaping behaviour towards, and interactions with, technology and physical design, may be less than wholly integrated into programmes to create universally designed environments.

• UD subscribes to a model of professional expertise that may limit the role of users in influencing approaches to rehabilitation.

• Before UD is used as the basis for rehabilitation, more research is required to identify the values shaping its principles, to evaluate how far they represent the most coherent approach to creating an accessible built environment.

• UD supports market mechanisms as a primary means to create accessible environments and reduces rights to access to a right to be exercised through a market presence or transaction.

Keywords::

• Accessibility
• architectural design
• cultural norms
• disability
• human rights

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Sarah Fielder, Marian Hawkesworth and Mariela Gaete Reyes who read and commented constructively on an earlier draft of the paper. I am also grateful to the referees’ of the paper who provided useful comments that enabled me to rethink some of the key argument about universal design. This article is a revised version of a keynote address at the Disability and Public Space Conference, April 28 to 29, 2011, hosted by The Disability Studies Working Group at Oslo University, Norway.

Declaration of interest: The author reports no conflicts of interest. The author alone is responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Notes

¹Despite the apparent popularisation of UD, Smith [23] notes that it is still marginal to the practices of many architects and development professionals who regard it as specialised design and not necessarily relevant to meeting the needs of corporate clients. There is a perception gap between what proponents of UD presents it as and what architects and designers understand it to be, that is, as a threat, potentially, to expressive and individual architectural styles. While this emphasis is important, there has been little academic attention or critical scrutiny of the overarching principles of UD, and how far they provide coherence in the understanding of disabled people’s access needs in the built environment (although, for exceptions, see [6,10,11]). This article seeks to redress this lacuna by describing and evaluating the underlying assumptions about disability and design shaping the content of UD, focusing on its prognosis of what ought to be done to attain an inclusive environment and how to achieve it. I argue that UD, despite its appearance to the contrary, has vestiges of a medical model underpinning its value-base, and clinical and physiological rather than cultural (social) criteria appear to be defining, and shaping, its design mentalities and approaches (also, see [11]).

²These examples highlight a possible distinction between UD for private spaces, such as dwellings, and for public buildings and places, and they raise the question of how far there is, or ought to be, different approaches by universal designers to designing contrasting environments premised on different value systems (i.e. the individual versus the collective, the public versus the private). What is the scope for UD to design universally within the context of the private home where individual or particular needs and values may predominate? How might this contrast with designing for public, or collective, buildings and places?

³Pullin [11] suggests that UD may become too complicated in trying to respond to a diversity of users, and some designers have rejected the UD route (see, for example, the work of James Leckey, http://www.leckey.com/). Pullin adds that by adding flexibility and complexity to achieve accessible design, it may compound difficulties in learning how to use it.

⁴To make the claim that there is a ‘disproportionate focus on technical innovation’ within UD is to align it more generally with other design traditions and applications. As Kumar and Whitney [62] observe, technology and market-centred design is a paramount feature of the global economy, and a core part of, and focus for, the operations of major global conglomerates involved in both product and architectural design services.

⁵There is little research about how far universal design may be characterised by a diversity of viewpoints and approaches to the subject matter. Such diversity does appear to exist. For instance, while there appears to be a commonality of values and concepts that bind together those that subscribe to UD, for some, such as John Salmen [63], UD is not a top-down, totalising, value-system, but is an ongoing, bottom-up, process, part of experimental trial and error. It is not the application of access standards or prescriptive regulations per se, that is, accessibility compliance, but, as Salmen ([63]: page 14) eloquently states, ‘the process of embedding choice for all people into the things we create’. For others, such as Harper [64], universal use through design for all is neither possible nor desirable, and the challenge for UD is to create and craft the designed environment in response to individual requirements, or what Harper ([64]: page 113) refers to as ‘design-for-one’. These respective viewpoints illustrate contrasting interpretations of UD, and there is a challenge to researchers to do much more work to describe and evaluate what universal designers do, and how far there are variations between them and their practices.

⁶It is important to note that particularism is not, logically, reducible to itself, and it is constituted in relation to other particulars and, for Laclau ([65]: page 48), all groups are intertwined, and are part of an ‘elaborated system of relations with other groups’. Groups do not articulate, or practice, their identities in isolation but, as Laclau ([65]: page 48) suggests, they are ‘regulated by norms and principles which transcend the particularities of any group’.