Breaking everyday barriers to inclusive city-making

BEAT is set to promote societal inclusion by mapping and eliminating mobility barriers as they manifest in the daily journeys of people with various forms of Physical and Cognitive Diversity (PaCD).

Everyday mobility is a fundamental necessity for active participation in society and for maintaining a healthy lifestyle. However, for people with physical and cognitive diversities, daily travels are fraught with significant challenges, creating a ripple effect of negative consequences that extend beyond mere inconvenience.

Operating from the standpoint that mobility is essentially a subjective human experience, this project aims to investigate urban mobility barriers as they unfold in the daily activities of people with PaCDs. The point of departure is "people", their routines, travel behaviours, and the impact of these hindrances on their personal, social, and professional lives.

This emphasis on lived everyday experiences entails investigating a wide range of barriers that may be labelled as temporary or even mundane. Examples of such temporary-but-everyday barriers include construction sites and road works, improperly parked delivery vehicles, poorly placed planters and bikes on the sidewalk, unauthorised market stalls, and so forth. While each of these situations may be perceived as a temporary problem, collectively they form a permanent reality of how we experience our cities. These barriers signify an "informal" layer of inaccessibility superimposed on more structural or "formal" accessibility problems in the city.