The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes Beyond Access

By David Gissen; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022; 216 pages, $24.95.

Reviewed by Sara Hendren

Every rights movement carries a tacit “before” and “after” scenario in its theory of change, and global disability rights movements are no different: In the before, a nation’s normative legal policies, its structures of education and governance, its built environments have been inaccessible to people with atypical bodies and minds. In the after—the imagined desirable future—those same structures are newly loosed from these hindering barriers. The world goes from inaccessible to accessible. It is retrofitted, refashioned, its seams opened up for more flexibility, pliability, generosity, making smoother passage through the human-made world a form of civic enfranchisement. Continue reading Book Review: Access Measures →