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Making space for disability in eco-homes and eco-communities

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journal contribution
posted on 2018-12-11, 11:26 authored by Amita Bhakta, Jenny Pickerill
There is continued failure to build homes for diverse and disabled occupancy. We use three eco‐communities in England to explore how their eco‐houses and wider community spaces accommodate the complex disability of hypotonic cerebral palsy. Using site visits, video footage, spatial mapping, field diary observations, surveys and interviews, this paper argues that little attention has been paid to making eco‐communities and eco‐houses accessible. There are, we argue, three useful and productive ways to interrogate accessibility in eco‐communities, through understandings of legislation, barriers and mobility. These have three significant consequences for eco‐communities and disabled access: ecological living as practised by these eco‐communities relies upon particular bodily capacities, and thus excludes many disabled people; disabled access was only considered in relation to the house and its thresholds, not to the much broader space of the home; and eco‐communities need to be, and would benefit from being, spaces of diverse interaction.

Funding

The Snowdon Trust

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Published in

The Geographical Journal

Volume

182

Issue

4

Pages

406 - 417

Citation

BHAKTA, A. and PICKERILL, J., 2015. Making space for disability in eco-housing and eco-communities. The Geographical Journal, 182 (4), pp.406-417.

Publisher

Wiley © Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2015

Notes

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: BHAKTA, A. and PICKERILL, J., 2015. Making space for disability in eco-housing and eco-communities. The Geographical Journal, 182 (4), pp.406-417, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12157. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions.

ISSN

0016-7398

eISSN

1475-4959

Language

  • en

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