Urban life in a wheelchair: which city is the most accessible?

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jun/26/wheelchair-which-city-is-most-accessible

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This week’s best city stories from around the web describe how easy – or otherwise – it is to get around various cities in a wheelchair, explore the Barcelona project to put mobile “micro-houses” atop buildings, and reveal Philadelphians’ proposals for new monuments. We’d love to hear your responses to these stories, and any others you’ve read recently, both on Guardian Cities and elsewhere. Just share your thoughts in the comments below.

Wheels on the bus

Peter Apps, writing in CityMetric, gives a personal account of the challenges of using city transport in a wheelchair – and reflects on which places are better than others. Paris, apparently, is a nightmare. “It has a relatively old metro system and only the bits built since the 1970s are accessible. The rest simply have too many stairs to be made reasonably wheelchair friendly at a non-ridiculous cost.”

The same is true of much of the New York metro and London Underground, Apps says. “I’m lucky enough to live in Canary Wharf where most of the links are relatively new,” he writes. “I can access most of the immediately available public transport links. That simply isn’t true in large swathes of London.”

In Washington DC, however, “there are lifts at every station. A wheelchair-bound person in DC can travel around with the same level of ease as an able-bodied person.” The only other city where Peter found this to be true? Dubai.

Barcelona’s top hat

Transforming underused space into housing, in an effort to contain urban sprawl, is nothing new. Rather than converting garages, basements and laneways, however, in Barcelona they’re taking the rooftops. As Mother Nature Network reports, “extra floors” are being added to existing apartment blocks, in the form of prefab units. These units are transported to site and hoisted up to sit atop the city’s historic architecture.

Madrid-based developer La Casa por el Tejado (House on the Roof) argues that they provide a sustainable alternative to traditional development. Electrical and plumbing components are installed in the flat-packed units in advance, so you can just plug in and go. And if you get bored of the view, you can just pick up and move.

The fire that time

The central government in India claims to be providing space for the urban poor through its Housing for All initiative, but critics suggest that they are doing the exact opposite – namely, forcing poor people out of the city in the name of technological progress. In this illuminating Scroll article, Supriya Sharma explains how residents of the Shukra Bazar slum on Delhi’s periphery believe that the fire that destroyed their homes was a deliberate effort to evict them from the land.

The slum is surrounded by middle-class apartments and a luxury Radisson Blu hotel. Until last year, a colony of waste collectors had lived on the land undisturbed. But now, municipal authorities are demanding they move: government funds have been allotted to develop a “smart city” there. One resident scoffs: “What is the point of installing CCTV and Wi-Fi when we still don’t know how to manage our garbage collection?”

Homegrown monuments

Last month, as part of the Monument Lab project, around 400 Philadelphians proposed new monuments for their city. Monument Lab has documented and mapped all of the proposals – oversized pretzels, abstract responses to gentrification, political sculptures against violence, memorials to the 1985 MOVE bombing and more.

Many of the proposed monuments commented on gentrification. “Many proposals seek to combat displacement and the erasure of marginalised communities by making the experiences and struggles of those communities more visible,” writes Sky Kalfus for Next City. So will any of them be built? Paul Farber, one of the project’s co-curators, says the first step “is to treat the ideas as valuable, constructive and precious parts of Philadelphia history”.