S3, Episode 6: Embodying Home

In this episode, we discuss what homes do to our bodies and to what extent their design can accommodate experiences of impairment and illness. The design of homes rests on assumptions about who lives in and uses those spaces. But all too often, ordinary homes do not recognise the possibility of disability.

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Podcast Transcript

Welcome to That Feels Like Home, a podcast by the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, reaching you from Middlesex University London. I’m Ana Baeza Ruiz, and I’m hosting this third series to look afresh at what ‘home’ is, and what it means.

We’ve previously looked at home from a wide range of perspectives, including in series 2 some of our shared experiences of home during the pandemic. This season, we’ll be in conversation with academics and activists who have moved beyond traditional ideas of home as a place ‘of safety, privacy, and care’.

Each episode will propose alternative readings of home, from its engagements with histories of empire, the politics of micro-living under neoliberalism, home as a queer space, or the changing meanings of home for people who cross borders.

As always, we draw inspiration from our collections, and the stories missing in them, to rethink the past through the lens of the present.

Ana: In this episode, we’ll be looking at what homes do to our bodies and to what extent their design can accommodate experiences of impairment and illness. Domestic design rests on assumptions about who lives and uses that space, about what our bodies can do, how our bodies think, move and feel. But all too often, ordinary homes do not recognise the possibility of disability. They’re built around the idea of non-disabled bodies. And this presents an injustice and major problem for people with lived experiences of disability. In this episode, we’re going to explore the extent to which definitions of home and house design have been exclusionary and how they might instead include different kinds of bodies. As in other episodes, we’re exploring the ways in which home is not straightforwardly safe or comfortable and how it can conflict with dominant conceptions of home as a space for control and security. And with us to talk about this and more, I’m so glad to be joined by Aimi Hamraie and Ellen Clifford. Thanks so much both for accepting our invitation. It’s wonderful to be able to speak to you today.

Ellen: Thank you.

Aimi: Yeah, thank you for having me.

Ana: Aimi Hamraie is a disabled designer and accessibility researcher they’re assistant professor of Medicine, Health and Society, at Vanderbilt University, where they direct the critical design lab. They host the Contra* podcast on disability design justice and are author of Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability, published in 2017 by the University of Minnesota Press and will be including a link to that in the show notes. Ellen Clifford is a disabled activist with disabled people against cuts in the U.K. and author of The War on Disabled People Capitalism Welfare and the Making of a Human Catastrophe, published last year in 2020 by Zed books.

Who is the world built for?

Ana: I wanted to begin with a broad question around this idea of who the world is built for. And I take this from the introduction of your book, Aimi, in which you write: ‘The built world is inseparable from social attitudes, discriminatory systems and knowledge about users which designers must keep in mind. Could you expand on that question? Who is the world designed and built for?

Aimi: Sure, that’s a great question. So I would say as a historian that up until the early 20th century, the world was built primarily for non-disabled people. And that meant people who use two legs to walk around and who have a great deal of physical strength and has vision and sightedness and hearing. And in in the time since then, there have been some very modest changes because the world knows different things about disability and the existence of disabled people who are able to survive and live in ways that people were not able to in the 19th century. We also have different technologies that enable disabled people to participate in public space, for example. And so architects since the 20th century have in very limited and inadequate ways, started to think about a greater range of bodies and people and ways of thinking and using space. And so, you know, there are still many places that default to a non-disabled person. And we would say the majority of spaces are still built for non-disabled people. And then there are some spaces because of laws or because of the interests of designers that have started to become more inclusive.

Ana: Thanks, Aimi. I want to link this to some of the collections in the museum, because we see how some of that rhetoric around normalcy in 1930s magazines of that have architectural examples of architectural designs, but also designs of domestic interiors. And they’re very much built on those notions of standardisation, of uniform design that are supposedly neutral. But obviously, they were constructed around, bodies that were, again, not disabled. So I wonder if you would like to expand. And also, Ellen, if you’d like to jump in on this, on what those shifting understandings have been of design the body?

Aimi: Sure. So, you know, the concept of normal didn’t exist until the 19th century. And standards for design emerged from things like the military needing to make, you know, uniforms for soldiers or designing airplanes and cockpits to fit a whole bunch of different kinds of bodies or factories, designing machines that could be used in standard ways. And so eh because the concept of the norm didn’t exist until industrialisation, basically, there was in some ways there was a greater acceptance of bodily difference before that, although it’s also true that disabled people were not often surviving under those conditions.

And in the 20th century, the field of ergonomics came about. It came from the military and expanded to the civilian sector. And ergonomics, in its own weird way, was about saying that there are a whole bunch of different types of bodies and they ought to be accommodated. But the reason why ergonomics were interested in that was that they thought that the differences between bodies were impediments to productivity and efficiency. And so, you know, that design for a kind of range of bodies rather than the standard really comes from capitalism. And disabled people have pushed back against that even further and said, you know, we don’t have to just be productive all the time. That’s not what access should be about. Access should be about being able to participate in society regardless of whether, you know, an adaptation makes us more productive.

Ellen: Yes, I fully agree with everything Aimi said there. And yes, the concept of normal didn’t arise until the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution. And when we say that, we’re not meaning to say that everything was brilliant. As Aimi said, disabled people often didn’t survive. But there were different forms of socio-economic organising. What we don’t have from the past is evidence of the places where ordinary people, the poorer people would have lived and worked.

And it’s as true now as it ever was that there is this intrinsic relationship between disability and poverty in Britain today, for example, disabled people are three times more likely to live in severe material deprivation than other people. So the kind of dwellings and workplaces from the past where disabled people would have been, we don’t really have the evidence of that now to be able to look and see, you know, were there different kind of adaptations that they made, given that there would have been a proportion of people living with some form of impairment, particularly given that the health technologies weren’t as advanced then.

But I just wanted to jump back a bit just to answer that. The first question about [3] who is the world built and designed for? And I think whilst agree with Aimi, my take is slightly different. I think my answer was going to be that it’s built for profit, whether that’s developers or other businesses who are directly benefiting through construction. And of course, in London at the moment, a particular issue is housing is a financial asset where it’s not built actually as housing at all, or whether it’s like local authorities who are discharging their responsibilities in a way that they try and do as cheaply as possible, but also in a way that doesn’t impede the government or at least this government’s economic agenda, which is to put the interests of business first and those of people last.

What I find quite interesting is that for all the disabled people and speaking as an activist, we do a lot of campaigning about inaccessibility of buildings. The most accessible examples I know are Weatherspoons’ Pubs, which has a reputation of having much cheaper alcohol and food and opening long hours from quite early in the day. And also betting shops, so on the estate where I live, like there are quite a few betting shops and they are in terms of accessibility, absolutely beautiful. They’ve got level access. They’ve got wide spaces for wheelchairs to turn. But they’ve also got, you know, heating in winter. They have people to help in terms of filling in betting slips. So they’re kind of a model of accessibility in some ways. And why is that? That’s because the people who are profiting from them know their target audience, who they’re trying to make money out of. And we also see that accessibility can be used as political cover sometimes, not to say that particular examples aren’t progressive.

So an example of this would be the Southbank, the area south of the Thames. when Boris Johnson was mayor, there was a lot of work done on that to make it a fully accessible area. And it’s brilliant because it is a place in London where you can, you know, meet friends who are a wheelchair user,. So that’s a place where we can meet. But at the time, the government and the mayor would use that whenever they were asked about disability. And this was the same time that the government was making dramatic cuts to the essential benefits and social care support that disabled people need to live on. So accessibility can be used quite cynically where there are discrete projects that can be used and amplified as cover. We see attempts fail to make things accessible when all the technology and the knowledge is there.

We have a situation with, you know, with homes. It makes a very, very small amount of the overall cost of building at home goes to make it wheelchair accessible. And yet the developers continue to lobby against. In London, we have a target that 10 percent of new-builds should be wheelchair accessible. And every time the London plan comes up for review, the developers are there and they’re lobbying against it. But this isn’t something that we only disabled people experience. We experience it more so than other groups because of the additional access needs that we have. But it’s something that, you know, that everyone’s facing at the moment, particularly with the planning deregulation that’s going on that’s going to benefit the developers. And it’s going to mean that the anyone who can’t afford housing is going to be stuck in in unsafe conditions. My brother (Ben Clifford) is actually a researcher at UCL who’s been looking into permitted developments where offices being all commercial premises can be converted into residential and there because of planning deregulation. That means that they don’t have to be built to health and safety requirements, no size requirements. So let alone being able to even think about accessibility, they’re just not safe for human habitation. So, yeah, I think definitely disabled people are last on the list to be thought of.

The economics of accessible housing

Ana: You’re listening to That Feels like Home, produced by the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, Middlesex University. I’m Ana Baeza Ruiz, and I’m talking with Aimi Hamraie and Ellen Clifford about who the world is designed for, and how. We now move on to talk about the economics behind accessible housing.

Ana: Ellen, thanks for drawing that connection between the  economic system and disability. I wonder if there is something here that also relates to what you were saying earlier about who’s a productive citizen, that there’s been this narrative also of who becomes a benefit scrounger and those sort of negative representations of people that might be needing welfare benefits or access to affordable housing. And if, Aimi, you’d like to comment on some of the things that Ellen has been saying, but in a U.S. context, particularly with chronic shortage of housing, both in the private sector but also in the public social housing sector.

Aimi: Sure. So, you know, the U.S. is different from the U.K. in many ways, our welfare situation has been like severely risk- in terms of like the state providing housing and resources has been severely restricted since the 1980s under Reagan. And even earlier than that, [in the US] the sort of the ways in which the government incentivize building accessible housing had entirely to do with the military industrial complex. And who was given funding and resources to access housing in terms of like veterans coming back from war. And so there’s this interconnected history of disabled veterans who are white, coming back from World War to be given mortgages and funding to go to university. And all of these things in order to live a particular kind of single family, suburban life. And there was a whole bunch of research about how to make suburban homes more wheelchair accessible for disabled veterans, the veterans who’ve been wounded in war. At the same time, a lot of historians have documented the ways that those same programs excluded black veterans and black people in general from accessing mortgages and accessing single family homes. And so those policies were responsible for the racial segregation in our cities. And in the time that disability access laws have existed, that affects either single family housing on a local scale or multifamily housing that is, for example, federally subsidized.

There has been this kind of like a split because, you know, federally subsidized homes have had to be accessible in some ways or abide by certain standards since the 1970s. And a lot of the people that I studied in my book on the history of disability access in the US, they were working on things like apartments and trailers and things like that, like ways that disabled people were trying to find accessible and affordable housing. At the same time, you know, there’s a big critique of the disability rights movement in the US and the passage of the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990), because many of the supporters of that law and the people behind it were very wealthy, disabled people. So they were kind of like out of the ordinary in terms of the broader population of disabled people. And the laws reflect that. And the laws protect businesses from having to make accommodations that they deem unreasonable or to make major structural changes. The laws don’t require kind of like widespread adoption. It’s really like on disabled people to enforce them and bring forward lawsuits and complaints and stuff. And so, you know, all of the ways that, you know, neoliberal policies and kind of like restrictions on access to affordable housing are affecting disabled people are part also of this broader history of some disabled people being given certain privileges because of the perception of who is disabled and who is not.

And then also just in terms of where accessibility laws tend to focus and where they do not. And so one of my critiques of the ADA too, is that it relies so heavily on regulations of public spaces, specifically businesses that accommodate to the public. And then things like transportation systems. But because of the way that the law is structured in the US, the ADA does not regulate the accessibility of private homes. And so it really then becomes up to these kinds of piecemeal reforms and individual cities and their building codes and things like that. And that has a lot of effects on the, you know, the ability of disabled people in general to access housing. You know, if it is the case that housing development is driven by perceived market value and who is a consumer, who’s going to have a lot of money, then, you know, in places where there isn’t a development boom, it’s also true that accessible housing may not be built and or it may only be built for people who are of a certain class status. And so, yeah, I think that all of these things are interconnected and that there’s definitely like a racial component to it as well.

Ellen: I think that’s really interesting about the military aspect there in the U.S. and also about the racism element within there. It is also true in Britain that the our; so we have the Disability Discrimination Act, and then that was subsumed by the Equality Act. And very similarly, that’s basically unenforceable. I think there was actually a House of Lords committee that ruled that it’s basically unenforceable because, again, it’s left up to individuals. And we do have in in London, we do have some targets around accessible home building that’s only for new builds. But there is you know, we do need new houses being built. And there are lots of developments going on a-across London. But the difficulty for disabled people here really is because we are much more likely to be reliant on state benefits. And disproportionately disabled people who are in work are in low paid, you know, insecure jobs where you still need to be in receipt of benefits in order to be able to survive. What disabled people really need, we really need social housing, we really need secure tenancies, but also for as anyone experiences on housing benefit. There is a big gap between rent and what you get in your housing benefit. And so if you if you’re in the private rented sector, then you have to find that, you know, you have to make up that shortfall yourself.

So what disabled people desperately need is social housing. And that’s the thing that’s not being built. The government brought out a green paper on social housing I think in the summer of 2018 and didn’t mention disabled people at all, except in the section on Extra Care supported housing. So in other words, kind of segregated complexes where all the older people and the disabled people would be would be kind of put together. So not recognising the fact that actually, you know, we are disproportionately represented among social housing tenants, but they’re also not recognising that we have and should have a right to live alongside, you know, our neighbours within our communities rather than being put into these ghettos. So that that’s a real problem that we have. We do have, as I say, these targets. But the problem is those targets tend to be for what’s being built. That’s called affordable housing that isn’t affordable, that’s out of reach of disabled people to begin with. and that ties into to go back to the question about the benefit scroungers. I mean, that’s this is all part of the same agenda, which is about cutting back public services as far as possible, privatising as much as possible. And so that means getting people off benefits, pushing them off, and also trying to push people into the private sector and away from away from social housing.

Segregation and de-institutionalisation

Ana: So we’ve seen more and more cuts, as you’re saying, in the U.K. and Aimi, you say that the US landscape is a bit different, but I’m interested to know, is there a re-segregation, you use the word ghetto Ellen – happening at the moment? If we think of the civil rights activist work in the 60s and 70s, the Movement for Independent Living, what were the victories of that time? is the landscape now bleaker?

Aimi: You know, I would say that it’s important to remember that when those activists were doing their work, they were responding to conditions of widespread institutionalisation. And so what they meant by, you know, having the right to live independently was having the right to live outside of institutions and nursing homes and you know hospitals and things like that. And so some of those activists, you know, in Berkeley, California, in the 1960s, when disabled students started to be admitted to the university, they didn’t have accessible dorms. So they actually had to live in a campus infirmary. But, you know, it’s not as if institutions don’t exist now.

And we know from the COVID 19 pandemic that disabled people who are institutionalised are living in a kind of like congregate housing conditions or nursing homes where at really high risk of having severe Covid complications or even just becoming infected because there are so many people in those spaces. But so, you know, a lot of what they were doing to challenge the definition of home was to demand access to home in the community, which did happen for some people through de-institutionalisation, like the fact that, you know, the front door of a house could have a ramp meant that a person did not have to live in a nursing home, for example, if they had access to other forms of care. And you know, whether that is being challenged or not, I think kind of depends on a whole, you know, a broader set of factors that include everything that we’ve been talking about here. And it includes access to work or other kinds of financial support in terms of structures like we’ve  seen that, you know, there are more possible accessible structures that are actually, you know, best practices for accessibility and things like that. And that in some ways is related. But it’s also separate from, you know, the question of like how societies organise disabled people, whether in and amongst the community, or separate and apart from it. And that has to do in part with how accessible public spaces are, but also other policies and the availability of resources and things like that.

Ellen: I was just reflecting on the on the US situation and wondering- I was wondering whether we got further along the de-institutionalisation route. But what is definitely true is that we are now going backwards and the (UK) government’s consistently missed its targets to close all of the long-stay institutions. And we’re seeing a growth of private hospitals. But what I think is another matter of concern is the phenomenon of re-institutionalisation within disabled people’s own homes. And this was something that the UN disability committee who came and carried out a special investigation of the U.K. in in 2015, and they published the findings that the UK government was guilty of grave and systematic violations of disabled people’s rights due to austerity and welfare reform. And that funding came out in 2016 and not long after they published a general comment on independent living. And I think they clearly had a situation in the UK in mind when they were talking about this concept of re-institutionalisation, which is where disabled people are being left without basic support that they need; unable to leave their homes, having to go for hours and hours without access to the toilet or to water or to food. And this is becoming more and more common. Having said that, though, generally disabled people would still much rather be in their own homes in those conditions than be placed in homes where they give up.

So, I mean, if you are reliant on visits from personal assistants in order to be able to function as many people and are finding, then you don’t have choice and control. You don’t have choice about what time you get up or go to bed. That’s down to what time you know, your personal assistants or if you are receiving care agency support, what time people come. So there’s definitely within that concept of institutionalisation, a lack of autonomy.

But still, people find the idea of being in care homes or nursing homes much more frightening because of the potential and level of abuses and just power dynamics and that lack of autonomy. There’s a phrase in the disabled people’s movement and ‘better dead than in a nursing home’. And that’s the way a lot of people are. And increasingly, local authorities are saying to people, if we calculate your support needs as exceeding a certain amount, then we will put you in a care home against your wishes. And what we found over the last 10 years is that the courts are very reluctant to make any decisions that interfere with government or local governments decision making over resources and economics. So this is really frightening for disabled people who, you know, my generation had grown up with the idea that we could live in our own homes. And having that taken away is you, as we say, very, very frightening for people.

Institutional and political processes of housing

Ana: Ellen, I wanted to ask you there, if you could speak a bit more about the specifics of those political and institutional processes that shape that the domestic design to fulfil or not the needs of disabled people. how this process, this institutional process actually work.

Ellen: Yeah, I mean, the processes are at a local authority level. And in terms of access to accessible housing, it’s very chaotic because there’s such a shortage of accessible homes. I think February 2020 is the last figure I’m aware of. there was just under one hundred and twenty thousand disabled people living in unsuitable accommodation. And the average, I think in 2018, you’re quoting Human Rights Commission, worked out that the average waiting time for accessible accommodation is something like twenty five months. But for some people, it can be you know, it can be up to a decade, much longer. And the kind of conditions we’re talking about, people not being able to access their own bathrooms. So having to wash in a paddling pool with a hose pipe in your living room, for example, And then we got the situation in in Grenfell, where, of course, you know, those the disabled people on the upper floors, you know, couldn’t get out and were left to die in that fire horrifically. And still, we have disabled people housed on upper floors of tower blocks where they’re not able to get a personal evacuation plan.

And all of this is caused by this chronic shortage of accessible homes. The reason for that is because government won’t invest in more social housing. They want to move people into the private rented sector. But disabled people don’t, you know, don’t feel safe in the private rented sector. They can’t afford it. Even if you were on benefits, you can’t afford it. And private landlords don’t want to rent to disabled people for a mixture of reasons. It can be stigma around benefit claimants, but also a lot of direct discrimination against disabled people. I don’t think there’s going to be a resolution to this problem until there is more investment in actual accessible social housing. It’s also because of the cuts, the big cuts, the local authority budgets. It’s very chaotic system.  there’s no kind of stocktake of accessible properties, because, of course, it’s done in London and borough by borough basis. So there’s no yeah, there’s no there’s no rationing. There’s no distribution. It’s very ad hoc the decisions that get that that get made. Disabled people can apply for things called disabled facilities grants from their local authority, which lets them have adaptations made to their properties. It could be their own property or to social housing, but they can be quite difficult to get. And again, that’s at the discretion of the people who’re making the decisions about money; and with cuts, it’s less likely for people to get those. At essential government level, what you then have is a lack of oversight and a lack of concern, because disabled people are not a group of people that this government likes to think about. They prefer to deny that we exist because our existence does get in the way of the economic agenda, which is to effectively deny disability in order to deny disability benefits and deny any form of state support effectively.

Universal design and collective access

Ana: You’re listening to That Feels like Home. In this episode, I’ve been talking with Aimi Hamraie and Ellen Clifford about the politics of housing for disabled people. In the next section, we move onto the topic of design and try to unpack a now very popular idea, universal design, what it means and to what extent it might afford collective access.

Ana: On the subject of domestic design, I wanted to ask you, Aimi, about the research you’ve done on universal design as a concept that’s become really popular  since the 1990s to refer to inclusive design that benefits everyone. But you’ve written quite critically about the discourse behind universal design and how it’s shifted from  its origins Can you speak a bit about this? Define a bit what universal design is. But also, what are some of the concerns?

Aimi: In the 80s, the disabled architect, Ron Mace, who was from the United States, he offered this term universal design, and he wrote an article where he basically argued that if we design architecture and spaces for disabled people, then non-disabled people also benefit from that. But he was you know, he was really emphasising the value for disabled people as well. And he made all sorts of arguments about, you know, this is prior to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). So he made all sorts of arguments, basically trying to convince architects that this was a good idea and it was in their self-interest, and also that they should care about disabled people. And [9] in the 90s, so the ADA was passed in 1990, and there was then this kind of assumption that the law had taken care of disability discrimination. And so a lot of the rhetoric of universal design shifted to becoming more about the market. And instead of emphasising civil rights or even disability and disabled people, all of these companies that make, you know, items for luxury homes or lighting or whatever started to use the term universal design kitchens, they started to use the term universal design and really market toward ageing people who are homeowners and, you know, have certain kinds of privileges. And my critique of this is that what happened as a result is that that original meaning of universal design as a kind of like a request for solidarity,  from non-disabled people toward disabled people and the understanding and meaning of a disabled identity as tied to access to the built environment, like all of that kind of fell out.

And so, for the most part, universal design become very apolitical. And it doesn’t have to be that way. There are certainly people who push back against it and use it in different ways. But because that shift happened, there’s just like a lot of components of disability experience and identity that are just not that legible to designers. Or if, you know, if you talk to an architect or even an architecture student, they may think about disability just in terms of ageing. They may not think about sensory disabilities or neurodivergence or, you know, people who have chronic illnesses or any- it’s just like a very limited understanding of disability. And that shapes the products that get made and that are mass manufactured. It shapes, you know, who architects tend to think about as important in the home or in public spaces. So there are there have been alternative terms that have emerged to try to address some of that. And [10] the disability justice movement in particular, you know, talks instead about collective access, for example. And collective access means that we all are responsible for producing access for each other and that we, you know, that non-disabled people ought to be in solidarity with disabled people around this.

Ana: And  just on that, I was interested in also what you were saying about the education of designers, of architects, and I suppose that’s one of the kind of key areas to work on in terms of reimagining what design can be.  I love that term collective access as that sort of  co-responsibility and also acknowledgement of the interdependency of all of us disabled and non-disabled people.  I wanted to ask you in this sense, your thoughts, if we’re to reimagine what access can be. We’re talking about housing specifically, but also the built environment at large. Are we to think more about co-designing that are much more relational in terms of the process of this design?

Aimi: Yes, definitely. I mean, I think that part of the reason why we’re in this situation is that design schools are really inaccessible to disabled students. And so there just aren’t that many disabled designers. And I think that that needs to change on a structural level and also that, you know, design processes. You know, can’t just use the codes as the bare minimum in designing, because then we end up with building- You know, like I was part of a project where we were trying to design a building that would exceed the ADA. And they still the architect still made a staircase, the sort of central design feature of the building. And they were like, it’s fine because there’s an elevator in the back. And I do think that something like co-design processes could address that. But I think the architecture on the whole is not going to change its attitudes and core assumptions until there are more disabled architects who are leading in that field. Yeah.

Ellen: I really like this idea of collective access. I think one of the difficulties with the idea of universality is that sometimes we have conflicting access needs. So  for example, you know, a tactile paving for blind, visually impaired people can be difficult and uncomfortable for wheelchair users. There are many examples, but within disability activism, we find ways of accommodating our respective access needs through discussion and collective action.  In terms of in terms of how we influence design and architecture I agree that there is far too little thought about these issues: I’m still cringing at the idea of the staircase being put into that into that design. I think much more co-design and co-production of government policies would be great in order to then be able to influence things like  co-design. There are discrete examples. So the Arsenal football stadium, the new stadium, the Emirates, I’m not an Arsenal fan, but I’m given to understand that there was a really good there was a really good process of working with the disabled fans on the design for that stadium in terms of accessibility. But there you’ve got a club with a lot of money, but you also was based in Islington, which traditionally was the home of a lot of a lot of the biggest, loudest disabled activists. So, I guess that kind of arose out of those specific circumstances there. But there are these examples which show how things how things can work. But getting that out on a much wider scale is part of the challenge. I really liked in the questions that you put together Ana thinking about this idea of how housing design could better embody the interdependency, which I think is such an important key feature of the way disabled people live.

And I think to be able to explore those concepts in more detail would be wonderful. I think [11] we spend so much time fighting for survival, like literally for survival with Covid, for example. And now we’ve got assisted suicide legislation going through parliament here. So, you know, these are life and death questions that we spend our time kind of thinking about. But our lives could be, you know, it’s really important to imagine how our lives could be so improved. You know, we have differences, big differences between members of the disabled community, depending on our impairments. You know, I think if we do spend a lot of time thinking about politics and socioeconomics and the bigger world out there, because, of course, what we’re able to do in our own homes depends upon the access to the resources we need to survive. But I do think that it would be good to be able to have some space to think more about, you know, the spaces we live in, I’m a mental health survivor. And for people living with mental distress, for  people with chronic illness, we spend a huge amount of time in bed and under lockdown, we’ve you know, we’ve discussed about, you know, whether we want to have ourselves on camera when we’re in bed or not. And is that a radical act? Because this is where this is where we spend our lives.

Ana: Thanks so much. I just wanted to finish with a quote by the late activist Vic Finkelstein (2007). And I’ll  read that out:  “We cannot understand or deal with disability without dealing with the essential nature of society itself”. I thought that was just a good place to end and also to just say thank you to both of you for joining us today. It’s been great to have you.

Aimi: Thanks so much.

Ellen: Thank you.

Ana: Thank you for listening, and especially a huge thanks to my guests for this episode, Aimi Hamraie and Ellen Clifford for joining us to talk about the history and politics of design in housing and accessibility.

This is the final episode of this series, but you can catch up with other episodes which critically question traditional ideas of home and venture into other, more critical readings of this space.

I’m Ana Baeza and this podcast is brought to you by the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, Middlesex University. We’ll be back again soon, stay tuned.

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Further Reading

Boys, J., 2020. Call to Action: A (Little) Manifesto for Doing Dis/Ability Differently in Architecture. Journal of Architectural Education, 74(2), pp.170-172.

Boys, J. Boys, J. ed., 2017. Disability, space, architecture: A reader. Taylor & Francis.

Boys, J., 2014. Doing disability differently: An alternative handbook on architecture, dis/ability and designing for everyday life. Routledge.

Clifford, E., 2020. The War on Disabled People: Capitalism, Welfare and the Making of a Human Catastrophe. Zed Books Ltd.

Davis, L.J., 2016. The disability studies reader. Routledge.

Finkelstein, V., 2007. The ‘social model of disability’and the disability movement. The Disability Studies Archive UK, 1, p.15.

Hamraie, A., 2018. Enlivened city: Inclusive design, biopolitics, and the philosophy of liveability. Built Environment, 44(1), pp.77-104.

Hamraie, A., 2017. Building access: Universal design and the politics of disability. U of Minnesota Press.

Hamraie, A., 2016. Universal design and the problem of “post-disability” ideology. Design and Culture, 8(3), pp.285-309.

Hendren, S., 2020. What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World. Penguin.

Guffey, E., 2017. Designing disability: Symbols, space, and society. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Williamson, B. and Guffey, E. eds., 2020. Making Disability Modern: Design Histories. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Imrie, R. and Kullman, K., 2017. Designing with care and caring with design. Care and Design: Bodies, Buildings, Cities. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, pp.1-15.

Imrie, R., 2004. Disability, embodiment and the meaning of the home. Housing studies, 19(5), pp.745-763.

Imrie, R., 2003. Housing quality and the provision of accessible homes. Housing Studies, 18(3), pp.387-408.

Penner, B. 2018. Home Economics and Flexible Design: https://placesjournal.org/article/home-economics-and-flexible-design/?cn-reloaded=1#footnote_19

Rembis, M. ed., 2017. Disabling domesticity. Palgrave Macmillan US.

Titchkosky, T., 2011. The question of access: Disability, space, meaning. University of Toronto Press.

UPIAS. 1975. ‘Fundamental Principles,’ Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation.

Williamson, B., 2019. Accessible America. New York University Press.

Credits

Produced by Ana Baeza Ruiz, with guests Aimi Hamraie and Ellen Clifford

Editing by Zoë Hendon, Ana Baeza Ruiz and Paul Ford Sound

Transcription by Mia Kordova

Music Credits

Say It Again, I’m Listening by Daniel Birch is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License

Let that Sink In by Lee Rosevere is licensed under Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)

Would You Change the World by Min-Y-Llan is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

Phase 5 by Xylo-Ziko is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.