The People's Sidewalks: Curb Cuts in Berkeley, CA

Here is a short article I wrote for the (newish) magazine BOOM: A Journal of California on the curb cuts built along Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, CA in the 1970s. Berkeley was not the first place to have curb cuts for wheelchairs - there are documented cuts in Kalamazoo, MI, and probably the first generally accessible city was Champaign, IL, near the University of Illinois. But as far as I can tell, Berkeley was the first place to have a planned "Wheelchair Route" - a contiguous set of cuts that carved out wheelchair access in a pedestrian district (shopping area near UC Berkeley) and then through a set of well-traveled routes (Telegraph from UC Berkeley to Ashby Ave; Downtown Berkeley along Shattuck Ave). These were planned by an Urban Planning student at UC Berkeley in collaboration with activists/staff at the Center for Independent Living.

New Blog (feature): Accessibility Watch

Last week, Metropolis editor Horace Havemeyer III described going to an event at the Player's Club in New York, where he had a hard time ascending the stairs to the parlor floor where the event was happening -- Havemeyer uses forearm crutches, and given the Players' Club's landmark status they have been exempt from accessibility requirements. This week, Havemeyer announces that there will be regular "accessibility watch" columns on Metropolis' blog. He writes:

Some restaurants that lack elevators, or that have stairs without proper hand rails, train their staff to look out for the handicapped and help them enter. But, in my experience, most do not. I know of many clubs in wonderful older buildings, often ones that are landmarked, that have little or no access for any level of the disabled. I wonder if the general feeling is that a landmarked building is exempt from the ADA.

We are looking for comments and examples of accessibility issues from all who visit our site. Please remember that at any hour of any day, any of you could join us handicapped—temporarily, I hope—due to a sprained ankle, a bike injury, or other chance accident. Leave your public comments using the form below [here], or e-mail your examples to pov@metropolismag.com.

The call is for New York complaints, mainly -- but it would be interesting to see a central spot for accessibility watches. I wonder what the most common access issues are, in ADA compliant, noncompliant, and exempt spaces?

link roundup: city life/facilities edition

San Francisco has unveiled some new bus stops with touch-screen (and audio enhanced) information screens and wifi hubs, once again putting my home city of New York to shame in their public transit accessibility and use of technology: they are currently in testing phase and 1,100 are planned.

The Dallas Morning News describes the experiences of an architect who spent 24 hours as a resident in a nursing home to understand the design issues

Chicago will open a National Public Housing Museum in the last remaining building in the WPA-era Jane Addams Homes. I wonder if there will be any discussion of disability issues, like the poor choices people with disabilities face in public housing and long histories of abuse in public hospitals/nursing homes.

Another tidbit of history: Penny Richards at Temple's Disability Studies blog spends some time in the Library of Congress' "Flickr Commons" and finds evidence of early 20th c. wheelchairs as a public convenience at the Bronx Zoo (much like at zoos/museums/etc today).

democratic cities

I feel like there has been a lot in the press lately about urban design and the "democratic" city. One of the endless fascinating things about urban life is how it is both public and private, accessible and inaccessible. The city for Baudelaire's flâneur is all about roaming about and being inspired, titillated, and entertained by the people and places of the city. I always felt as a longtime New Yorker that I am never alone as long as I have the city streets. But of course, the city has its flip side-- you can see and be seen, but you can also see where you are not welcome, or be seen in an unpleasant way, stared at out of curiosity, fear, or horror, or shoved out because you don't belong.

- In the Doors of Perception blog, an interview between John Thackera and Sunil Abraham is mainly about eco politics and sustainability in building cities. They emphasize a balance between speed and "slowth" (must be a british thing), not abandoning all goals of modernity and efficiency, but emphasizing local resources and measured mobility alongside speed of information. Their comments on urban planning as a government/commerce project are great:

JT. Show me a city with a “dynamic image” and I will show you an unsustainable city. “Dynamic” usually means high entropy buildings, financial speculation on a massive scale, and a low degree of social participation. From now on, the most interesting cities will be those whose citizens are able to invest their energy and creativity on “re-inhabitation” within the unique ecosystems of their place. This approach will often involve adaptive or more intense uses of existing infrastructure rather than the construction of signature buildings - and sometimes this approach will mean building nothing, nothing at all. To live sustainably we need to place more value on the here and now: a lot of destruction is caused when design is obsessed with the there, and the next - and the “dynamic”.

SA. First, the dynamism of a city can be found in the informal sector which in most developing countries accounts for 70% of employment. It is also where legal, technical and market limits and norms are challenged and redefined as everyday practice. The informal economy also has a much lighter infastructure. [...]

This last comment strikes me as so smart-- all the action is in the "informal sector" where streamlined resource use is not about "efficiency" or government protocol, but about reality. This "informal economy" is also run by personal relationships, not bureaucracy:

[SA continues]: ...non-market micro-economies such as gifting, barter, collectives and commons in developing countries are more effective than classical development interventions in addressing problems of social development. For example, home-based care is cheaper and more effective than hospice-based care for people living with HIV/AIDS. I would like to see more celebration of the informal sector, informal practices and non-market micro-economies.

- On a way fluffier note, the weird NY Times T Magazine style blog had a post about "off-limits" NY places. It is probably true that being hard to get into increases the "magnetism" of some spaces-- this is the whole model on which social clubs are based, right? I was glad to see a lengthy comment bemoaning the "travesty" of having so many architectural wonders of NY as spaces only for the rich. No mention of wheelchair accessibility (unsurprisingly) but I was thinking about what kind of exclusivity physical inaccessibility makes. When I walk around New York, I am often aware of how style and physical access are twinned, that high-end places often involve some form of physical venture to get into-- made all too clear to me, for example, when I mistakenly took my nonogenarian grandmother to a gorgeous, exquisitely designed vegetarian Korean restaurant where the seating was on the floor with legs shoved into a recessed hole under the table. Is a lack of ramp, or a narrow dark passageway, or the big heavy door at so many galleries and fancy stores, the same kind of message as a bouncer or the ubiquitous "girl with a list" at NY parties (or so I see when I walk by them)? It's a bit different, to be sure. Maybe it's more about asking you to feel unsafe for a second, increasing the "magnetism" via risk and fear? The more I look the more i think that the whole high-end fashion/design world is about this-- making you feel uncomfortable as a gateway. Ugh.