Strolling Into Imaginaries. When the Constitution of Space Produces Disabled Bodies – No Anger
by Laia Meier and Alex Walter
It’s something the majority of us don’t really think about much. We walk around in streets and parks and open doors to enter buildings without that causing us any problems. But by doing this we cross lines we don’t even know could be borders to others. When the elevator is broken, we take the stairs. We’re seldomly remembered of our privilege and how the spaces are designed upon the principles of some bodies, but not all bodies.
In architecture school we are taught to design spaces for people. We learn how buildings interact with different environments, how architecture adapts to different cultures and how it is essential to think through as much as we can in every project. But the discussion of different bodies of people never comes up. It is simply assumed that our designs apply to the normal, abled bodies like it was always done in the history of conventional architecture.
(I remember a project I did last year consisting only of ramps and every floor being accessible without an elevator. I wanted my ramp to have a slope of 6% so it would be suitable not only for people with bikes but also people with wheelchairs. But as I presented my idea, I was told not to focus on those 6% and that it wasn’t important now to design for people in wheelchairs. )
It is just now, in the seminar „Architecture of Gender – Care Work“, that we come across the notion that our norms and conventions are based on an ableist world view. And that what is expected from us in the studios is an architecture with spatiality that prioritizes some bodies over others.
It’s more than time to question that approach.
No Anger is a PhD candidate at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France. Her work concerns nudity and sexual representations in political organizing, particularly on the Femen and pornactivism.
She is a disability activist and performer.
The Imaginary and Spatiality
In her article „Strolling into Imaginaries“ published in the Funambulist 19 September-October 2018 she explains that the presence of disabled people in public spaces is not made visible. Architecture and certain design decisions make disabled people feel excluded and alienated to human community because no one has imagined the disabled people in the society.
Dr. Nina Mühlemann, who held a presentation at the talk organized by the seminar „Interdependent Bodies“, tells of her time in the hospital giving birth to her child and there was no wheelchair access to the nursery so she could hardly visit her newborn baby. No Anger’s article helps us to understand how such things can happen.
She mentions the term of the imaginary. What No Anger means by this is a template of how we think about bodies and how they take part in society. How we imagine the bodies we design for have a direct impact on how the spatiality looks like in the end, as spaces are built for bodies. Architecture imposes an order on bodies and creates a hierarchy between them. It defines the rights of the people who live in them, who is able to enter and who isn’t.
The imaginary is a collective image that says for which kind of bodies spaces are created. But the relation between spatiality and the imaginary is even more complicated, writes No Anger. Certain spaces create and reproduce again these imaginaries about bodies.
A guest at the talk „Interdependent Bodies“ at the ETH tells us that she wanted to go to the sport centre but was quickly stopped by one of the employees: „We don’t have wheel chair accessibilty here. We’ve never had that here before.“
It is often assumed that disabled people have no social life because they’re only rarely seen in the public. This assumption is based on a corporal script, which consists of roles and prejudice assigned to an body. Like the female body is often still seen as a mother, a sexual object, a person who does housework and stays indoor most of the time. It is the same logic that surrounds disabled bodies.
Corporal scripts are constructed through society but also through the spaces we build. A space controls movement, assigns roles and determines rights for a body to be present or non-present and therefore again constructs a certain image of bodies.
So the assumption that disabled people don’t have a social life is based on the spatiality and the corporal scripts of the imaginary body that space is based on, but not on reality. The reality is that the public spaces aren’t accessible for and therefore not representing disabled people which leads to disabled people actually staying at home. They are excluded and made invisible to the public.
Sport Center at the ETH (ASVZ, Campus Hönggerberg).
Theater of Bodies
„But I am not invisible. I am not silent. I have a body. I have a voice. A voice that can sing or cry. A body that is alive and free. (…) I want you to see me in the manner that I decide. Now, on stage, I am going to dance.“ (No Anger, The Funambulist 19, page 30)
Public spaces are like a theater where bodies are shown in a certain way. How they are presented or not determines the manner in which those bodies are seen and accepted in society. No Anger talks about holding hands with her girlfriend in public. Nobody can imagine that they are a couple, they will think she’s simply a friend or a teacher. The role is assigned to them by heterosexist and ableist logic and therefore her desire and her lifestyle, her body has to be invisible. Her presence is an exception to the „normal“ and not expected in public and therefore questioned and unwanted. She feels that when people ask her „Why are you how you are?“ or „What is wrong with you?“, they are actually saying „Why are you here?“.
Disabled people are expected to be in specialized spaces for them. But isn’t it the specialized spaces that create the narrative about some bodies being abnormal and special in the first place?
The imaginary body is a cage, continues No Anger. It reduces disabled people to their disability and makes them invisible to the public. We have to learn to forget the imaginary. Because every body matters and every body has the right to be shown and seen on the streets.
Regrets of Freedom, No Anger, 2018
Re-presencing instead of Inclusion
No Anger argues that accessibility that is based on a preconceived idea on what a disabled body is, reproduces again the imaginary disabled body. Instead of making disabled people feel welcome and accepted, it again creates more erasures and a distinction between bodies.
At worst, norms of accessibility are based so much on the imaginary that in reality it serves no support at all. It is then simply a label that is achieved when following norms but not when actually including disabled people in the design process. Without participation of the bodies for whom the space is actually built for there can never be a space in which everybody is represented. It isn’t rational nor efficient and only leads to supplementary expenses in order to „readapt the maladapted adaptation“.
Above all, designing for disabled people should not be an adaptation at all but a creative factor from the start of the design process, as Jos Boys argues in the talk „Interdependent Bodies“ at the ETH. Architects often follow the approach to first design for the normative bodies and then afterwards almost like an afterthought make some adaptation to achieve the norms for disabled people as well. This is discriminating whether we architects realize or not.
That is why No Anger urges us to forget the concept of inclusion and instead start re-presencing disabled people in the community.
Because inclusion implies that one has to conform to certain terms to be included. The effort then stays again with the disabled people in order to be a part of the public. Jos Boys calls this „invisibility work“. It not only includes all the additional effort as a disabled person living and coming around in an ableist world but also having to explain their situation to non- disabled people. At the talk at the ETH Dr. Nina Mühlemann and artist, Caroline Cardus, tell of situations where they’re being asked where the elevator is and how it works, because they must now, since they’re in the wheelchair. They’re asked to admit, that some adaptation are non-reasonable and that it’s okay and understandable that they cannot enter certain spaces.
So instead of trying to include differently-abled people (or letting them include themselves) No Anger proposes the term „re-presencing“. The idea is to not try to speak for disabled people but to letting them speak for themselves. It’s about redefining what matters and designing new spaces that allow everyone to be presented and to be present. And this is only possible with the participation of disabled people in design process.
We must leave the imaginary norms and designs for fictional bodies based on corporal scripts and go to the people we design for.
Real people. With all kinds of bodies.