The Disabling City
This collection of short essays explores the connections between urban studies and critical disability studies. Despite an increasing interest in the role of embodiment, affect and sensorial urbanism, urban studies has demonstrated a relatively limited engagement with physical, sensory or intellectual disabilities. For this series of essays, we invited authors to reflect critically on the social, spatial, cultural, political and/or economic processes through which cities and disabilities are co-constituted. The four essays collected here draw attention to the role of disabilities – and associated urban communities, movements and spaces – in shaping urban politics, epistemologies and everyday life, drawing on the authors’ work in cities in Australia, India, Ireland and the United States.
Read together, these four essays indicate the various experiences of urban mobilities, precarity and injustice that people with disabilities across the world share, while also demonstrating the immense diversity of these experiences within and across cities. More broadly, the essays act as a call to urban studies to incorporate these diverse experiences of disability more directly into our theorizations of urban difference and inequality.
Reading Development 