No home for the disabled: The disabling metropolis of Delhi

Abstract

Delhi is today one of the most diverse urban centers in India. While the Delhi metro, with its many disabled-friendly features, seems an exemplar of the ideal inclusive and open city, other attempts to create more inclusive constructions of habitation there remain fragile. Through an analysis of Shivani Gupta’s autobiography No Looking Back: A True Story, which captures her attempts to negotiate India’s national capital as an orthopedically disabled person, this article examines how the social and architectural construction of public spaces in Delhi privileges particular forms of embodied citizenship associated with a normalized body. It reveals that the development process is characterized by socio-institutional structures and relations which are insensitive to and ignorant of the needs of disabled people. This is symptomatic of an architectural apartheid and a wider set of ableist power geometries. The “reflexive modernization” thesis of Ulrich Beck is applied here to the geographical understanding of disablement.

Keywords:

• Disability
• accessibility
• barriered and bounded spaces
• architectural apartheid
• reflexive modernization
• Shivani Gupta