Designing for Inclusion
"Access" only implies open doors.
With the advent of the Americans with Disabilities Act, ramps and railings are proliferating. Where it was once standard practice to use steps, landscape architects now face daunting engineering challenges to use long ramps without breaking up the site into pieces which are too small to function as effective public spaces. With all the new regulations, some newly designed spaces may not seem very user-friendly.
These new requirements, however, offer an opportunity to redesign our environment based on the principle of inclusion. After all, we are designing for our neighbors, friends, relatives, and visitors, for our entire community, for people of every description wishing to enjoy our precious landscape. We can design the structures in every space to be more comfortable for those of us who are blind, deaf, mobility impaired, or otherwise disabled. We can design spaces to facilitate participation by anyone and everyone regardless of their physical condition or any accompanying mobility equipment. Let's offer choice and selection, in addition to access. Our new public spaces will then better serve our broad and multi-faceted society.
Most people enjoy the natural world, even in the reduced and constrained form of many urban landscapes. Our pleasures range from physical recreation to spiritual rejuvenation. When the weather is good, there are few people who don’t want to enjoy the beauty and sensory richness of the landscape. Urban landscape spaces hold great potential for recreation, conversation, reflection, observation, and meditation. We need to make sure these spaces work for all of us.
In the following pages, we have attempted to illustrate how landscapes can be developed which accommodate the variety of physical needs of people. We have also tried to facilitate a full range of sensory experience in the landscape: textures, smells, sounds, and views.
Confident mobility and sensory access are both highly important to enrichment of our urban experience. Even the most wonderful landscape will be essentially inaccessible to anyone preoccupied with just keeping their balance. The struggle to get a wheelchair out of a rut or the discomfort of crossing a heavily textured surface can be great enough to outweigh the potential benefits of an experience of natural beauty. Navigating through a public landscape can be also be a fearsome experience for someone with low vision. Pavement edges, where the landscape begins, are where safety ends for those who have lost their sight. Even for the sighted, being lost distracts terribly from the enjoyment of a landscape.
Unobstructed walkways with gentle slopes are a fundamental part of a welcoming landscape. Grips, guides, and places to rest are also needed throughout the landscape to offer assistance in getting around comfortably. These need to be available, yet unobtrusive. The choice of materials and forms should not single out any landscape feature as being for "the disabled."
The plants in the landscape which are closest to walkways and benches are most often planted below knee level. The wonders of the landscape are therefore just as distant from people who find it difficult or inconvenient to bend down as they are from those who cannot bend down. We can solve that by doing a better job of bringing the landscape to people. Raised planters are the most common and most effective answer. They may need to cantilevered so that we can comfortably approach them without bumping knees or wheels. We can also integrate plants into other landscape furniture in a variety of ways. We need to redesign many of our site utilities, such as picnic tables and drinking fountains, which don’t work for anybody very well. Simple, maintenance-free mechanisms are important. Modular construction is often desirable, where a few types of manufactured units may be arranged in a multiplicity of ways. Using recycled plastic and other new materials may reduce expense and provide new standards of durability. All these considerations also make improved site furniture more financially accessible!
Even that familiar stalwart of the landscape, the park bench, doesn’t serve our whole community well. We heard a lot in our focus groups about the need for varied heights, better means of transfer from wheelchairs to benches, more comfortable seats and surfaces, and better backrests.