Disability and Smart Cities: On Communication Policy, Technology, and Justice in Future Societies by Gerard Goggin (University of Sydney) paper presented at Communication Policy and Technology section of 'Memory, Commemoration and Communication: Looking Back, Looking Forward', International Association of Media Communication Research (IAMCR) conference 27-31 July, 2016, University of Leicester

1. Memory, Commemoration and Communication:
Looking Back, Looking Forward
IAMCR 2016 Conference, 26-27 July 2016
Communication Policy & Technology section
Gerard Goggin/@ggoggin
University of Sydney
Disability and Smart Cities:
Communication Policy,
Technology, and Justice in
Future Societies

2. argument of paper
• informed by critical disability studies, science
and technology studies, media studies, &
mobilities research alike, the paper explores
the issues and opportunities for policy and
technology presented by disability and smart
cities.
• As a form of “future thinking” or “social
imaginary,” disability and smart cities offers
insights into: histories of media technology;
politics of technology in the present; and
shaping of future societies

3. Disability is often invoked
in discourses of smart
cities; & a key element of
social imaginaries of
urban & media
technology

6. Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Microsoft’s Chief Accessibility
Officer, announced the company’s support and
sponsorship of the initiative stating,
“Technology empowers persons with disabilities
to achieve more in the places where they live
and work. As cities evolve and integrate new
technologies, we can help them define what it
means to be smart – and accessible – to make
sure no one is left behind.”
Source:
http://www.g3ict.org/press/press_releases/press_release/p/id_95#sthash.TPuAMlxW.dpuf

7. The Smart Cities & Digital Inclusion June 2016
initiative is a significant intervention;
however, there, as yet, has been little research
or critique of disability and smart cities;
Whereas, there are important critiques &
research on smart cities, from a range of
standpoints – disability media research can build
on, enrich & complicate this work

9. ‘ … self-congratulatory nature of the smart
city … what do we actually mean by the
term, and precisely what elements go into
making up a smart city? What underlying
ideological assumptions are made by
invoking the concept, and what are its
central social contradictions and
problems?’
Robert G. Hollands, ‘Critical Interventions in the Smart City’,
Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society (2014)

10. ‘Large scale visions of the smart city that are
presented in many academic research papers
and corporate marketing materials seem in
direct contrast to the ways in which citizens
envision it. The citizen’s vision and sense of scale
is a perspective that is largely absent from [this]
literature … our paper seeks to introduce the
concept of smaller, more tangible interventions
in the city that have the potential to be more
meaningful for citizens’
Vanessa Thomas et al., ‘Where’s Wally? In Search of Citizen
Perspectives on the Smart City’, Sustainability 2016

11. disability helps us
reimagine cities &
media

12. outline
1. genealogy of disability, cities, & media
2. Disability, mobilities & smart cities
3. state-of-play of “becoming” of smart cities
globally now. What is the state of play of
disability and accessibility in actual cities
now?

13. 1
genealogy of disability,
cities, & media

14. majority of world’s population
lives in cities
great opportunities, terrible inequalities
majority of people with disabilities in world live in
‘global south’ (majority world) - how many in
cities?
‘cities are terrains of struggle’ (Mayor Kgosientso
Ramokgopa, Tshwane, South Africa)-
‘our cities are profoundly unequal places’ (Steven
Friedman)
disability increasingly important urban struggle,
esp. in ‘service’ & ‘being part of city’

15. Source: Violeta Blue
Ayalay Facebook
post

16. Are our cities ‘enabling’ rather
than ‘disabling’?
What about: transport? housing? Work? Welfare? health?
Education? - for people with disabilities living in cities?
Social, cultural & political participation in the new spaces
& polities of cities?
What is role of urban communication & media digital
media, interacting with these dynamics? Where do
mobiles, Internet, digital technologies fit into the lives of
urban dwellers with disabilities?
Where does disability fit into smart cities? How does
disability help us reframe cities, media technology &
policy?

17. disability + mobile tech
in everyday life
disability is now recognized as a significant part of social
life & life course
digital technology – esp. computers, the Internet, mobile
media, social media, apps, geolocation technologies, and
now, ‘smart’ homes, wearable computers, mobilities
technologies including driverless cars - have emerged &
are being ‘imagined’ as a significant part of the
mediascape, cultural infrastructure, social support
system, and personal identity and repertoire of many
people with disabilities
mobile & mobilities are central to disability &
participation, esp. in cities

18. ‘A significant and persistent characteristic of society
is disabling spaces that are rarely sensitised to the
needs of disabled people … More often than not,
designed environments revolve around a spatial
logic that separates people by virtue of their bodily
differences and variations in cognitive and
physiological capabilities. Such separations are
tantamount to an infringement of disabled people’s
liberties, and curtail, potentially, their rights to
occupy, and to inhabit and be present in everyday
places, the use of which is intrinsic to a person’s
realisation of their well-being.’
Rob Imrie, ‘Space, Place, and Policy Regimes: The
Changing Contours of Disability and Citizenship’
(2014)

19. ‘Crippling the Landscape 1 : Québec City is a thirteen minute video that chronicles a
five kilometer journey from Laval University to the Ste- Foy train station. Join
filmmaker and disability activist Laurence Parent as she takes you on the trip of a
lifetime! Feel the experience of the road from the point of view of her wheelchair!’ –
see 53 s mark onwards

20. Will Hawkesworth critiquing the
GreyFriars Hotel, Colchester, entrance
foyer redesign project Source: Rob Imrie’s
Universalising Design blog

21. The idealised format of modern living and design requires
space, light and a lack of clutter in design and spatial
planning … As a result, the entrance foyer is an open and
airy design, where the emphasis on a lack of “clutter” has
extended to the use of an invisible lift to allow access
from the entrance foyer to the reception desk area; the
protective barriers being invisible by sinking into the floor
… Yet there is no signage as to how to use the lift, and
wheelchair visitors need to shout up to the reception
desk (or get their friend to ask/press a button externally)
to gain help as the operating system is also hidden.
Source: Will Hawkesworth critique of GreyFriars
Hotel, Colchester, entrance foyer redesign project
Source: Rob Imrie’s Universalising Design blog
‘A day in the life of accessible design: the case
of the invisible lift’

22. ‘the need to re-(politicise) the
body as part of the development of
what citizenship is or ought to be,
in ways whereby impairment
becomes regarded as the normalcy
of everyday life’
Rob Imrie, ‘Space, Place, and Policy Regimes: The Changing Contours of
Disability and Citizenship’ (2014)

23. So: what would a re-
politicising of bodies &
citizens & media
technology in ‘smart’
polis look like?

24. Repoliticising bodies & media tech,
step 1:
writing the disability
media histories of
the city

25. Author: ‘Tape Aids for the Blind’, Sign on
Main Street, Cape Town, August 2015

26. Blind people have long histories
of using media – sound/audio
such as clicks; guide dogs; GPS;
mobile phones – for navigation,
wayfinding, and mapping cities

27. sonic pathfinder (Tony Heyes,
Melbourne-based)

28. 2
Disability, mobilities &
smart cities

29. 7 July, 2014,
‘ReWalk’
website,
reproduced
from Boston
Globe

32. Exchange
Telstra
blog, 1
May 2014

33. Molly Watt
- Living
with
Usher’s
Sydrome
Blog, 29
April 2015

35. Stacey Zoern’s Kenguru, from Paul Richoux, ‘Kenguru: the perfrect car for wheelchair
users?’, ‘Wheelchairs and Mobility’, 24 September, 2014

36. 3
smart cities globally
now: state of play of
disability, exclusion &
accessibility

37. The right to the city for people
with disabilities?
right to political and public participation is a key
article (29) in UN Convention on Rights of Persons
with Disability (CRPD)
right to political and public participation interacts
with article 21 on freedom of expression and
opinion, and access to information (new right to
communicate)
& article 30 - Participation in cultural life,
recreation, leisure and sport

38. Megafone, MONTRÉAL*in/accessible,2012-2014
http://megafone.net/montreal/*Arseli

39. ‘driven by the disability rights movement
and fuelled by an understanding of social
structures rather than the individual as
the point where disability has been
activated, there have been attempts to
hack cities and streets to retrospective
provide access for people with
disabilities’
Cake, D & Kent, M 2014, ‘Hacking the City: Disability and Access in Cities Made of
Software’ in T. Brabazon (ed.)City Imaging: Regeneration, Renewal, Decay. Springer,
Berlin.

40. How smart cities & associated digital technologies (e.g.
mobiles) are ‘imagined’, design, made & sold - & configured
in policy - do not capture the realities, desires, uses of
people across the world, especially the emerging mobile
internet in urban Africa, Latin America & parts of Asia
Case in point: Facebook’s Internet.org - access to selected
websites/services with no data charges
Case in point: public free WiFi is now coming on agenda (e.g.
various cities), b/c it responds to realities of people’s mobile
use
Mobile imaginaries are very narrow when it comes to
disability; let alone urban lives of people with disabilities,
negotiating city systems, participating in city politics, wishing
to thrive, survive & enjoy their cities
Little media coverage of disability issues in cities - - major
issues in journalism & media in coverage & representation of
disability

42. The experience of mobile communications of
the majority of participants was limited to
making calls, receiving calls, sending or receiving
SMSs and instant messages. Few participants
living in low and very low-income households
experience the wide array of communications
services and mobile Internet communications
that are on offer … largely because price levels
are out of alignment with household income
levels.
-- Luci Abrahams and Kiru Pillay,The Lived Costs of Communications: Experiencing
the lived cost of mobile communications in low and very low income households in
urban South Africa 2014 R2K/Wits (2015)

43. Roads & highways & transportation is often very
difficult for people with disabilities to use & access
how do people with disabilities in South Africa -
especially in suburban, townships, ‘peri-urban’ &
rural areas - afford, access & use local buses? Is
there accessible design?
‘overwhelming majority of South African
households do not have regular access to any form
of motorised transport and that this seriously
undermines their ability to participate in key
economic and social activities’
(2007/2008 RSA Dept of Transport survey, cited in Karen Lucas, ‘Making the connections between
transport disadvantage and the social exclusion of low income populations in the Tshwane Region of
South Africa’, Journal of Transport Geography, 2011)

44. ‘Mobility may be considered a
universal human right, yet in practice
it exists in relation to class, racial,
gender, and disabling exclusions from
public space, from national
citizenship, and from the means of
mobility at all scales’
Mimi Sheller, “Uneven Mobility Futures”, Mobilities,
2015

45. conclusion
Critical analysis of disability &
world cities offers us new
perspectives on fundamental
questions of communication policy,
technology, and justice, in the
imagining and making of future
societies

46. ‘why would the future utopia of mobilities and
social justice and people with disabilities not
start here and now, not just in our cities, with
their growing hybrid mix of virtual and built
environments, but also in areas outside the
metropoles where infrastructures and
resources to support differential mobilities are
typically constrained?’
Gerard Goggin, ‘Disability and Mobilities: Evening Up Social Futures’

47. ‘After all, if we do not comprehend the
“becoming” of disability and mobilities in
situ now, and the embodied sensory,
social, cultural, collective, and personal
practices in place and space presently —
how can we imagine, design, and enact
expansive, enabling, and just societies in
the near or far future?’
Gerard Goggin, ‘Disability and Mobilities: Evening Up Social
Futures’

48. Further reading
Gerard Goggin, ‘Disability and Mobilities; Evening Up Social Futures.’ Mobilities 11
(2016)
Laurence Parent, Parent, L. 2015. “Wheeling NY City. Who Does Winter Belong To?”,
M.I.A. Collective Blog, http://mia.mobilities.ca/who-does-winter-belong-to/.
Rob Imrie, ‘Space, place and policy regimes: the changing contours of disability and
citizenship’, in Soldatic, K., Roulstone, A., and Morgan, H., (eds.), Disability – Spaces
and Places of Exclusion, Routledge, London, 2014, 13-30.
Charlotte Bates, Rob Imrie and Kim Kullman (eds), Care and Design: Bodies, Building,
Cities, 2017
Kim Sawchuk, K. (2014) ‘Impaired’, in Adey, P., Bissell, D., Hanman, K., Merriman, P.
and Sheller, M. (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Mobilitie (London: Routledge, 570-
584)
Katie Ellis and Gerard Goggin. ‘Disability, Locative Media, and Complex Ubiquity.’ In
Ubiquitous Computing, Complexity, and Culture, edited by Ulrik Ekman, Jay David Bolter, Lily Díaz, Morten Søndergaard, and Maria Engberg,
270-285. New York: Routledge, 2016.