cosmolinguist | ableism and "active travel" (Reply)

Lately I'm beginning to wish I had a more academic background in disability. I can see so many ways it would be useful for my job.

I've been finding links from social media like this which I lifted the list of disability models from -- particularly Critical Disability Studies and the social justice model of disability -- to include in a work e-mail (the work e-mail was a thing of beauty that I probably spent too much effort on especially because it will never have the audience it deserves).

And this was written four years ago and is articulating ideas directly relevant to my job role and which I'm only beginning to fumble toward because I'm starting from first principles.

The urbanists I worked alongside were motivated by a sense that cities ought to be built for people, rather than cars, in order to promote public health and safety. Yet the question of what kinds of people exist and ought to be supported in public space was not approached through the frameworks of accessibility, disability justice, or mobility justice.,.. These imperatives, repeated throughout active transportation promotional campaigns, framed bodies like mine – slow bodies, fat bodies, bodies needing respite – as problems to solve rather than as a form of human difference deserving access to the built environment.

Critics of active transportation take issue with the question of what kinds of people urbanists imagine will transport themselves actively. For example, they question the logics of active transportation for weight loss, pointing out that this produces an anti-fat bias and privileges thin people....

These critiques dovetail with the work of the broader Mobility Justice movement, which questions the whiteness of cycling culture and brings an explicit critical race framework to the study of urban mobilities. As the Untokening Collective argues in its Principles of Mobility Justice,

“Safety is more than protection from cars… When people live at the intersection of multiple vectors of oppression, unfettered access to mobility and public space are not guaranteed… Racism, sexism, classism, able-ism, xenophobia, homophobia and constraints imposed upon gender-non-conforming folks can make the public space hostile to many. Bodies encounter different risks and have different needs.”

And especially this; this is one of the big issues of the first year of my job, captured really articulately here:

On the surface, it may appear that debates about active transportation are taking place between non-disabled cycling advocates and disabled opponents of active transportation infrastructure. The reality is much more complex, however. If there are “sides” to this debate, both the position in favor of the mandate for healthier cities and the position seeking to qualify this mandate make a claim to benefitting disabled people. Some disabled people cannot drive cars, argue active transportation advocates. Some disabled people cannot use bicycles or walk, respond critics. What is at stake here, however, is not simply the empirical truth of these claims, but rather the politics of disability they profess....

Indeed, the complex meanings of disability, as well as the politics of ableism, have been sidelined in efforts to show that individual disabled people are for or against active transportation. In this sense, active transportation debates participate in what I have called “post-disability politics”, which depoliticizes disability as a challenge to compulsory normalcy, treating it instead as an experience of individual disabled citizens and consumers. A feature of neoliberal disability rights, post-disability politics emerged in era after the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Such politics purportedly include disabled people, while excluding the possibility that ableism is a system of values shaped by the imperatives to be so-called healthy, normal bodies.

Indeed, these debates would benefit from engagement with critical disability theory and politics. Rather than take the category of disability for granted as static or all-encompassing, critical disability theory questions how the figure of the disabled person is constructed in relation to mandatory whiteness, capitalist productivity, aspirational urban citizenship, and liberal notions of agency. Crip theory, in particular, questions the imperative toward compulsory normalization, offering theories of accessibility as grounded in friction and contestation.

The Disability Justice movement explains the political stakes of these questions. This movement, led by disabled people of color and queer disabled people, emerged in the twenty-first century in response to a lack of intersectional approaches within mainstream disability activism. Earlier disability movements emphasized legal and rights-based approaches to accessibility, which often limit access to compliance and understand disability as an individual, rather than collective matter. By contrast, Disability Justice centers anti-capitalism, interdependence, and intersectionality. For Disability Justice, it is not enough for cities simply to abide by the ADA. Rather, accessible cities need to center “cross-disability solidarity”, a commitment to not leaving any disabled people behind.

Taking an intersectional framework informed by Disability Justice and Critical Access Studies, I propose further exploration of Crip Mobility Justice. This framework would build on existing efforts to attend to the uneven distribution of accessible urban mobility by prioritizing the dismantling of ableism. For Crip Mobility Justice, accessibility would be less about individual consumer preferences, such as whether or not disabled people want to ride adaptive bicycles, and more about commitments to interdependence and widespread accessibility. This would include eschewing the logics of health promotion in active transportation, which promote normalized body types, in favor of broad accessibility. While Crip Mobility Justice could certainly include sidewalks and bicycle lanes as options in multi-modal transit systems, it would also prioritize curb cuts, adequate and sensory-friendly lighting, spaces of respite and quiet, public restrooms and water fountains, as well as housing justice and the abolition of policing and surveillance. In other words, it would promote cities built for the most marginalized disabled people.