Learning from Disabled Spatial Narratives

Overview

Disabled people remain adversely affected by barriers in the built environment. This project explores how space syntax – a model that analyses buildings as spatial networks influencing behavioural outcomes – can be adapted to better understand which spatial properties contribute to exclusion or inclusion.

About the research

Spatial layout choices made by architects have profound effects on how buildings are used: what we experience upon entry, how we make our way through buildings, who we encounter where and how often, and how we connect with others.

These effects have long been studied using space syntax, which typically models movement patterns and encounters based on spatial accessibility (the shortest paths from any place to any other place in the spatial network) and visibility (what you see in straight line distances). Despite space syntax's recent attempts to understand the diversity and multiplicity of buildings, there is a gap when it comes to users with different bodies and minds.

Research approach

The research team collaborated with eight artists, designers and architects living with diverse disabilities to map their experiences of 22 Gordon Street, a building on the UCL campus, extending and adapting space syntax methods. The data gathered – through audio-descriptions, text, drawings, collages, photographs and films produced by the disabled creatives as well as through a group workshop – highlights which aspects of a building enable (or disable) inclusive participation. The findings will inform conversations with UCL estates and architecture practices to explore how these insights could create more genuinely accessible constructed environments for the future – at UCL and beyond.

In this project, the research team asks: How do buildings present themselves to individuals who cannot see, or those who cannot walk and therefore move their bodies in different ways? Or to neurodiverse people with different experiences of spaces, encounters and noise; or to deaf individuals whose understanding of space relies mostly on vision?

Preliminary results of the collaboration with eight artists, designers and architects living with diverse disabilities suggest that experiences are both very specific to individuals and their body-minds but also in many ways shared and overlapping. The analysis suggests an emergent grouping around four themes:

• sensory experiences
• intersections across space, time and energy
• spatial clarity
• and being expected in the building

The existing space syntax paradigm can be fruitfully challenged by such disabled spatial narratives, through critically engaging with ways of occupying space that may not be captured through current models of movement and visibility.

Image: Landing space at 22 Gordon Street as experienced by neurodivergent designer, Natasha Trotman