Space, Place and Policy Regimes: the changing contours of disability and citizenship

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Imrie, Rob. 2014. Space, Place and Policy Regimes: the changing contours of disability and citizenship. In: Karen Soldatic; Alan Roulstone and Hannah Morgan, eds. Disability, Spaces and Places of Policy Exclusion. London: Routledge, pp. 13-30. ISBN 9780415854801 [Book Section]

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The chapter outlines the case for the focus on the inherently geographical nature of policy regimes in which, as I shall argue, the fortunes of disabled people have to be understood as indissoluble from the intersections between space, place, and policy. Such intersections, in the context of a post-welfare world, are shaped, in part, by the human worthiness of disabled people being, increasingly, discredited in a context whereby welfare policy reform is placing onus on self active and self starting individuals as the basis of a good society. I develop this discussion in the second part of the chapter where I focus on the diminution of disabled people’s liberties with reference to placed-based restructuring in three different policy domains, housing, transport, and public space. In each instance, public policy is intersecting with place to recreate spaces of exclusion or environs that deny opportunity for self hood. I conclude the chapter by outlining the need to (re) politicize the body as part of the development of what citizenship is or ought to be, in ways whereby impairment becomes regarded as the normalcy of everyday life. The assertion, of the normalcy of impairment, does, however, challenge the socio-cultural constructions of disability in society, including the crafting of disabling spatialities that render, potentially,impairment as an object of disablement. I suggest that these relations (of disablement) may be challenged by the development of a body politics that develops the discourse that everyone, irrespective of corporal form and performance, has the rights to inhabit, or to be emplaced, in ways whereby spaces are facilitative of a person’s autonomy or the intrinsic value of the self.

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