Can Tactile Tiles Create Accessible Urban Spaces?

Abstract

In this article, the authors examine relations between citizenship, spatial accessibility, place appropriation, and territorial production that arise from the insertion in urban public spaces of new material objects—tactile tiles—employed to improve the orientation of visually impaired citizens in the city of Florianópolis in Brazil. The authors start by describing the materiality of tactile tiles, their functions, and physical attributes and how they can communicate useful spatial information through new signs and codes to support a safer orientation when visual information is lacking. Territory production, materiality, and appropriation of space are addressed based on the existence of the legal mandatory application of accessibility laws, public service attributions, local spatial configurations, and potential different user interpretations. These questions are illustrated by the multiple immaterial questions that arise from these new objects’ local applications. Finally, the authors discuss the role of urban planning in the construction of inclusive urban spaces.

Keywords

policy territory production spatial accessibility visual impairments tactile tiles

Introduction

Spatial accessibility is a primary factor for social inclusion and the effective exercise of citizenship for all people. To guarantee mobility, access to public transport systems and the free use of space and urban equipment is fundamental for the development of all social activities. According to Santos (1987), access to effective citizenship depends on political, cultural, and social forces acting in harmony with the spatial distribution of work opportunities, social equipment, and the facilities in any given territory. The unequal spatial distribution of all kinds of activities and services in practice creates “spaces of noncitizenship,” where the conditions for participation and integration in society are far from ideal. These two concepts are interdependent, and we can infer from them that there is no effective citizenship when spatial accessibility is nonexistent or limited. Geographical studies state that accessibility is determined by the spatial distribution of potential destinations, the ease of reaching each destination, and the magnitude, quality, and character of the existent activities (Handy & Niemeier, 1997). However, it is necessary to broaden the definition of the accessibility concept as a set of conditions that allow physical movement in space only and to include the necessary conditions for the understanding and effective use of space. In accordance with these definitions, attempts to improve spatial accessibility as a necessary step toward citizenship have to go far beyond the mere facts of “reaching a goal” or “being there,” as they are linked to the real possibilities of space appropriation.

The existence of spatial accessibility is a necessary condition to achieve social inclusion. However, it does not guarantee its attainment, since it also depends on cultural and social factors. In the opposite situation though, its absence can signify actual social exclusion, in the same way as the absence of work, educational, and public service facilities can do. For citizens with impairments this relation is vital, since the absence of accessibility at all levels can impede or restrict their understanding and use of, as well as, mobility with in space. To create proper conditions of accessibility for them requires an understanding of the problem from a different perspective and for one to go beyond the mere identification of barriers for the accomplishment of desired activities. To understand how people with different kinds of impairments can perform the activities is crucial in creating the environmental conditions that can reduce the task’s demands and guarantee the intended accessibility.

Brazilian social movements of impaired people, allied with national and international movements and agreements working toward the inclusion of impaired citizens, have assured their rights in urban and public spaces through accessibility legislation. Differently from other countries where the incidence of visual disabilities affects mostly the elderly, in Brazil, together with the increase of visual impairments due to ageing, there are still a significant number of people who are born blind or whose sight is impaired at an early age. This situation arises from poverty, a lack of basic health care services, and the high number of traffic and work accidents.¹ Of the 24.5 million Brazilians with some form of impairment, approximately 10% present some form of visual impairment, 70% live under the poverty line, 33% are illiterate or have attended school for less than 3 years, and 90% are excluded from the work market (Lanchoti, 2007). Like the majority of the low-income population in Brazil, they live in slums and on the outskirts of cities. Consequently, to create conditions for spatial accessibility to public transport and to urban areas, it is crucial for them to have greater access to education, work, health services, and other public services. It is the responsibility of the public services to produce the territories that are necessary for their mobility.

Among the existing resources that help guide people with restricted access to visual information in outdoor and indoor public spaces are tactile tiles. The placement of tactile tiles in public spaces allow the acquisition of information according to two important systems related to the identification of potential hazards and identification of secure routes. The use of these tiles in urban areas, especially on railways and at metro and bus stations, is very common in Brazil and in other countries. Some countries have adopted tactile signs with a safety function only, one that warns of the dangers and obstacles (e.g., the system used in the United States); others use the way-finding system. This system, in addition to identifying potential hazards meets three other functions: to guide pedestrians through a safe route, to identify changes of direction in a route, and to mark the setting of a specific activity. There are wide varieties of available options concerning both the materials (concrete, ceramic, polymeric, metal, etc.) and the logic system employed that correspond to the tiles’ design. It is important to stress that in order to create equality of access, it is essential to consider the technical aspects that constitute the differences between tactile accessible tile design and their logic application systems. In this sense, it is often the technical norms that describe their functions and the corresponding technical design characteristics that determine their use in order to create preferential territories for visually impaired users, that is, the means and equipment that can provide the equalization of opportunities and allow spatial access, such as in the cases of accessible toilets and parking places for people with mobility problems.

However, in relation to this issue of the inclusion of impaired citizens in Brazil, we find a paradoxical public movement that initially promised legal inclusion, yet in many places led to exclusion due to the action—or rather the inaction—of local public administration. When constructing preferential territories for the visually impaired, materials were sometimes used incorrectly, putting users at direct risk and thus hindering accessibility. The intention of this article is therefore to analyze and debate the implementation of tactile tiles in the city of Florianópolis² to try to explain the factors that have contributed to the production of a useless “materiality” whose ultimate effect has been to maintain exclusion.

Theoretical Aspects of the Role of Tactile Tiles and Pathways for Visually Impaired People and Territoriality Production

The Materiality of Tactile Tiles

In order to understand all the factors involved in the material design of tactile tiles and how to guarantee tactile tiles’ legibility and consistency of meaning in different places and situations it is necessary to comprehend spatial orientation processes in the presence of defective vision. Since their primary function is to support a safer orientation through spaces, we have to specify the particular function of each type of tile and the general logic required to create an integrated alternative information system.

To understand how tactile tiles can support safer orientation in space for the visually impaired, we need to understand how the reduction or lack of visual information affects users’ spatial orientation processes. Orienting oneself through space is a purposeful act that implies more than mere mobility, since it involves a basic understanding of time–space situations and a comprehension of relations in a spatial context. To be able to orient oneself, different levels of actions occur simultaneously in an intricate process. The presence of defective vision reduces not only the amount and quality of usable sensory spatial information but also interferes with all levels of the orientation process. Therefore, to support safer orientation for partially sighted individuals, it is necessary to increase the possibilities of their obtaining visual information and to understand which environmental conditions affect their residual visual capacities.

Taking into account the impossibility of obtaining environmental visual information, new methods have to be created to provide sources of information that can be sensed by users’ remaining perceptual systems. Exploratory touch, oriented locomotion, and selective listening are the main channels of acquiring spatial information in a cooperative form for the blind. To create a full orientation system is in this case very complex and should involve not only physical intervention in the space itself but also complementary support such as tactile maps, oral descriptions, and user training to allow the acquisition of further knowledge about the location’s spatial structure and functioning. A detailed spatial analysis is key to identifying the existent potential information and in locating the activities, landmarks, and references present, in order to provide understanding of spatial relations and in allowing use of the place and its appropriation.

On a more practical level, tactile tiles can provide information that supports mobility and orientation along routes,³ gives directions and distances, warns of the presence of barriers and hazards, and also points to where decisions have to be made. The primary element to take into consideration for blind users is their detectability through touch by feet and the stick. This is achieved through an adequately raised design and through the right choice of material. The tile material is particularly important, as its texture and acoustic quality can further enable it to be distinguished from the surrounding materials. Accessible tiles, however, must also assist people with different levels of visual impairment and also the general public. Since visual impairments automatically encompass a wide variety of visual perception, it is important to guarantee the color contrasts that are required for their differentiation and perception. Usually a contrast between very light and dark colors, such as black and white, or safety yellow combined with other surrounding colors is suggested.⁴ It is also important to consider that the changing environmental and climactic conditions such as light, reflections, and shade can affect the existing color contrast.

Since the 1980s studies have been made around the world—particularly in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan—to find a product design that is safer, more comfortable, and more easily detectible for the largest number of people. The recommendations and norms from these countries have been based on their studies, and they now serve as models for other countries including Brazil.

The different types and functions of what are commonly called “accessible tactile tiles” can be summarized as follows:

Warning—To sign the presence of potential dangers and hazards (where to stop and where not to walk)

Guidance—To indicate the directions along routes (where to walk safely)

Choice—To sign the possibility of changing directions along routes (points at which one can explore and decide the direction of movement)

Goal—To mark the presence of a desired activity or equipment (see Figure 1)

Figure 1.

Examples of the four types of tactile tiles in different countries: warning (1), guidance (2), choice (3), and goal (4). Images courtesy of Agency for Ceramic Design Development/Architecture and Urban Planning Department/Federal University of Santa Catarina. Image Sources: Marta Dischinger and Melissa Laus Mattos, 2003 to 2008.

The design of tactile tiles has to consider how their technical and formal attributes guarantee the best recognition possible. Their detectability depends on their contrast between each other and with the surrounding pavement regarding their relief, texture, color, and if possible density and sound characteristics. Moreover, each intended function has to have its meaning interpretation reinforced by the “form” of the tactile information. This means that to sign “danger” the tactile information has to be very distinctive and should also induce an almost instinctive stop. Consequently, the relief has to be rougher and even uncomfortable for the feet and consist of raised cone sections. The main concern regarding the dimensions and distribution of the bumps relates to the need to avoid them being sensed as a smooth, homogenous surface, as well as, being read as guiding lines. Conversely, the indications of “guidance” along a safe route, and reaching a “goal,” have to be comfortable both for walking and for standing on the tiles’ surface. Guidance tiles’ relief builds up continuous lines that can be followed by the feet or with a stick. To call attention to changes of direction, the relief should “interrupt” the guidance line once again, but its shape must not be confused with the one used to sign dangerous situations.

Since the presence of danger and hazards is the most important function, in many countries the warning tile is the only type of tactile floor employed. It is also the most well-studied of the four types and its design is defined by norms and rules with precise definitions of form, height, and position of relief that have been tested in regard to their recognition possibilities and safety (Bentzen, Barlow, & Tabor, 2000). It is also common that when tactile systems include guidance routes, the functions of indicating both the presence of danger and choice for new directions are accomplished using the warning tiles. In this case, these take on a double meaning. This is the case in the Brazilian norm. The fourth function of indicating the presence of an activity is not defined in any norm and varies significantly, very often being completely absent.

If we reflect on the complexity of the orientation process in outdoor and indoor public spaces, we can infer that the creation of tactile routes implies the reduction of the complexity of existing local information and options. This simplification is necessary, since perceiving visual information while walking differs radically from obtaining tactile information while walking. To design an accessible route, we need to select relevant information by creating a coherent logical system and consider that the time taken to interpret tactile codes has to be allied to the necessary time to perform the correct action. An example is the need to stop walking before reaching the edge of a train platform or the first step of a staircase, specially a downward flight. For any orientation system to be fully efficient, it has necessarily to include additional information, such as tactile maps or totems with Braille or sound information, to complete the information that is lacking and increase the possibilities of understanding the places where routes are located.

Territory Production, Materiality, and Appropriation of Space

Following the worldwide social movements toward social inclusion of impaired citizens in the last 20 years, great effort has been made to confront this problem in Brazil. Since the 1990s, community associations and other entities have been instrumental in leading the struggle to ensure equal social rights and the right to be different and to guarantee access to work, education, and leisure for people with disabilities⁵ (Fávero, 2004). Their efforts have resulted in wider social awareness of the problem, and more recently in the creation of national laws,⁶ regulations, and technical norms that assure inclusion rights and make the improvement of spatial accessibility in all public spaces mandatory by decree. Thus, new regulations for spatial accessibility in Brazil state that public spaces have to be adapted for use by everyone.

Public urban design services are responsible for correctly implementing the accessibility laws and technical norms and also for assisting and surveying professional activities in the creation of urban and built-up spaces. The National Decree n° 5.296 (Decreto-Lei n°. 5.296, 2004) declared that it was the responsibility of the state and public institutions to assure the material production of territories aiming at their accessibility.

Consequently, the construction of a “materiality” of accessibility depends on the design of public spaces, and in particular, of tactile routes—territories of specific use for visually impaired users. Their construction and maintenance are the responsibility of public authorities who employ what Kärrholm (2007) defines as territorial strategies. According to him,

Territorial strategies represent impersonal, planned, and, to some extent, mediated control, and often involve the delegation of control to things, rules, and so forth. Territorial strategies are (to a degree) always planned at a distance in time and/or space from the territory produced. (p. 441)

The construction of tactile routes in public spaces is constrained by other forms of territorial use and production that involve power complex relations (Kärrholm, 2007). The materiality of tactile tiles can either offer no meaning for other users and social groups or represent a constraint for other forms of territorial appropriation. Tactile tiles on urban pathways and inner spaces of public buildings are necessarily not exclusive. Everyone can and should walk over them, and they cannot be interpreted as preferential or exclusive paths, as is a bicycle path for instance. Depending on the knowledge of the meaning of these “new” elements they can be interpreted as decorative tiles, as a sign for the blind, as a discomfort for walking; they may even go unnoticed. Hence, according to Kärrholm (2007), it is important to investigate “the meaning of materiality and artefacts through the roles they play in different territorial networks” (p. 443).

Urban design actions should go beyond the inherent qualities of objects since they have to consider “their functional and symbolic interpretations by people who build and use them. . . . Objects can therefore only make sense in an interpretive context, when human agreement assigns meaning and value to them” (Madanipour, 2005, p. 7).

In this way, urban design should take into account other forms of use in order to create real “public spaces.” In the words of Kärrholm (2007),

It seems that making [space] accessible (and, in this respect, making public) cannot be equated with the erasing of boundaries. In fact, the opposite seems more likely: The access to space has to be subdivided (in time or space) to accommodate different uses and to make room for as many different categories of users as possible. (p. 447)

The complexity of urban and built-up environments and the inability of the law to cover all possible situations increase the public services’ responsibility to apply what seems to be a “simple” material to create truly accessible routes for the visually impaired.

A central question in the application of this new territorial production therefore is how to create meaningful codes in different real public spaces applying the rather general, scant, and limited solutions presented in the new technical norm (Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas, 2004). It is crucial to find appropriate solutions, as the delineation of these “preferential” territories leads to their possibilities of appropriation of space, and consequently to their intended accessibility.

Spatial appropriation is a complex process and depends on the understanding of space and of the possibilities that different spaces offer. For visually impaired users, spatial appropriation is largely dependent on their feeling of safety, of being able to follow a route, of recognizing hazards and intended goals. Accessible routes allow their participation: walking in the city, accessing the public transport system, signaling the entrance of public buildings, recognizing places and locations. This recognition is supported by the use of logical codes that are materialized by the tactile tiles. The safety and congruence of this communication system depends on the consistency of the designed solutions, which depend both on the tiles’ physical characteristics that allow their recognition and on a correct logical system for the entire route. For blind users to be able to find goals, to feel safe crossing a street, they often depend on the existence of these material traces and codes applied in the correct places and with the correct meanings.

It is very important to consider that although the mere presence of tactile routes does not guarantee space appropriation, their absence, or incorrect use, can actually jeopardize it. Knowledge of how tactile tiles communicate their meaning in urban spaces is vital to assure the material construction of territories that can be appropriated by visually impaired users. It is important to define at this point a different and more complex concept of territory.⁷ The more common definition belongs to the geopolitical field where territories are owned and controlled by a nation, a social group, or private entities and possess clear physical traces of its areas and limits in space. There is also a behavioral assumption within this concept where territories can be permanent or transitory places “owned” or occupied by individuals or social groups who mark their possession with material traces or attitudes defining personal or sociocultural territories.

In the case of preferential territories constructed to allow spatial accessibility and appropriation for special users, such as the case we are discussing, the notion is more complex and subtle. The temporary “owners” or preferential users of a delimited space have to recognize its material traces—tactile tiles—to be able to expand their abilities to access and appropriate space. It is the insertion of a code materialized in a tactile form that enables accessibility to be created. This singularity is associated with the fact that this code is not necessarily known by other users. Consequently, when this understanding does not exist, either during the decision-making process that decides how the space will be constructed, or during its use by all users, the results can be disastrous for the very users who should benefit from it.

Therefore, the construction of accessible routes in urban environments through the use of tactile tiles is always a complex task. Problems are of different natures: material problems related to the technical and physical characteristics of the tiles and nonmaterial problems related to the interpretation of technical norms in different spatial contexts, the interpretation of signs and codes by different users, and the attribution of responsibilities for the materialization of space. In the next section, we will describe what we have observed in the last 20 years in the application of tactile tiles in public urban pathways in the city of Florianópolis, a medium-sized city situated on the island of Santa Catarina in the south of Brazil that has tourism and public administrative services as its central functions. Although this city is not a major urban center in Brazil, this examination is representative since Florianópolis was the first city to implement an accessibility project for visually-impaired citizens on a large urban scale.

The Materiality of the Territorial Production in Florianópolis Public Spaces

The problems observed are of different orders and include the use of tiles with inadequate physical attributes, the existence of projects where there is an “incorrect” use of tile codes and/or functional logical system, the difficulties of interpreting and following a mandatory norm in complex or reduced areas, the incorrect application and maintenance of tactile tiles by the public services, and finally the misuse and misinterpretation of codes by all users. In all cases the consequence is the same: a lack of consistency of the code system that could lead to dangerous situations and invalidate existing good solutions. Very often, problematic situations involve several or all the above-mentioned problems.

To fully grasp the complexity of the problem, it is necessary to go back in time and describe the first intervention that introduced tactile tiles as an accessibility solution for the city of Florianópolis in 1998 and 1999. It is very important to mention that this intervention happened before tactile tiles were defined by the technical norm NBR9050/2004 and that it still generates most of the conflicts that can be observed to the present day in the city of Florianópolis.

A study on the historical city center’s accessibility was developed as a cooperative project between the federal university and the local planning institute between 1997 and 1998.⁸ In 1998, it became possible to make accessibility a goal for a larger revitalization project that was being conducted by other public services through a technical consultancy. However, the deadline for its insertion into the larger project was very tight, and there was no integration between the technical team responsible for the accessibility design and the teams from the different institutions responsible for their implementation. The solution proposed to improve the safety of the visually impaired was to align the urban equipment and furniture along the pathway and mark it within a different pavement border. This solution was adopted while taking into account the narrow dimensions of the paths in the historic center of traditional Portuguese colonial design and the high incidence of barriers that make it difficult to create continuous guidance routes along the pathways.

When the project was applied, there were four significant things that happened. The first was the politically motivated choice of the location for the pilot project. The chosen area was the final part of a street situated in a very rich central neighborhood. This street though starts in one of the poorest and most deprived areas of the city’s historical center, which leads to the central bus station. This neglected part should have been the natural choice for a project aiming to improve urban accessibility. The second important factor was with respect to the lack of integration and dialogue between the designers from the city planning service, who were responsible for the project, and the technicians from other public services, who were responsible for the actual construction of the technical solutions. In some parts of the pathway the obstacles, such as lamp-posts and traffic poles (see Figure 2), were removed, and then placed back just outside the special signaling border pavement. This invalidated the desired solution and led to misinterpretation since the intended safe area was lost. The third factor was the choice of the cement “red alert” tile (in reality pale pink) to mark the border line of where not to walk. Its design is inefficient, since its relief form has four lines of semispheres that can be interpreted as guiding lines, and the color contrast is poor. This choice, when allied to the final fourth factor, was instrumental in leading to a series of misinterpretations that continue until today. When the project was implemented, there was no concurrent public information campaign to spread awareness regarding disabled citizens’ accessibility problems. More seriously, this lack of awareness hindered comprehension of the proposed solutions. These three last factors have greatly contributed to the dissemination of erroneous solutions all over the city and for the ongoing inversion of meaning of the alert tile as a guidance route.

Figure 2.

Traffic poles placed outside the special signaling border pavement; warning tiles made of cement with poor color contrast and dubious relief design of aligned spheres; ceramic warning tiles according to the technical norm. Images courtesy of Agency for Ceramic Design Development/Architecture and Urban Planning Department/Federal University of Santa Catarina. Image sources: Marta Dischinger and Melissa Laus Mattos, 2003 to 2008.

It is also important to mention two other associated facts. The first was the lack of participation in the project by the association of the visually impaired.⁹ Due to this and to its misinterpretation of the proposed solutions, the association led a campaign in the local media showing how a “guidance” path would lead the blind straight toward obstacles. Later on, the association directed a request to the city council and the Ministry of Justice for the pavement to be substituted with the correct alert pavement (similar to that actually determined by the technical norm). The second factor had both positive and negative aspects. The pathway project was very well received by the population mostly due to functional and aesthetic reasons; the streets were more attractive in appearance and were safer and less polluted than before. The continuous red borderline helped both pedestrians and drivers to distinguish the limits of the pathways. Because of this, the border solution was adopted spontaneously as a pattern solution for all urban pathways, even though the population in general continued to ignore the true accessibility meaning of the tiles that were being employed.

What changes can be observed today regarding the application of tactile tiles after their definition through a technical norm?

Unfortunately, the most common alert tile and the only one that is available for sale in Florianópolis construction shops is the one that was used in the urban revitalization project. It is made of cement and does not follow the present norm specification that presents a different relief (see Figure 3). Its relief with aligned soft bumps is easy to misinterpret and it can be confused with a guidance tile. These characteristics reinforce the difficulties in interpreting its meaning by all users and also do not guarantee safety, since due to their low material quality they are easily broken especially when used on the edges of pathways. As mentioned earlier, since this solution was taken as a model in the city without a corresponding information campaign, it is now used indiscriminately and very often has the opposite meaning of that which was intended or even only serves a merely decorative function.

Figure 3.

A route made of cement warning tiles employed as guidance tiles leads directly to danger; photo showing a woman with low-vision walking straight toward an obstacle; warning tiles (alert track) interpreted as a guideline for the bus queue; in the last photo all tiles are employed disregarding their function. Images courtesy of Agency for Ceramic Design Development/Architecture and Urban Planning Department/Federal University of Santa Catarina. Image Sources: Maristela Moraes de Almeida (1st Image), 2009, Marta Dischinger and Melissa Laus Mattos, 2008 to 2011.

Another highly relevant aspect is the maintenance, until recently, of this technical solution in urban projects under the responsibility of planning institute technicians. To maintain a solution that has become identified with the city image seemed to be more important than to follow accessibility laws and guarantee conditions for better orientation and safety for the visually impaired. This generates solutions where sometimes there is a guidance path according to the norm, but where sometimes the maintenance of a continuous “alert” border makes it difficult—especially for a blind user—to understand where to cross the street.

All these conflicting factors require solutions. Clearly, the development of a new family of tactile tiles that are technically correct, safer, and offer better performance regarding legibility is not enough to solve the existing problem. The aim of our final discussion is to search for some answers that can assist in the construction of inclusive urban spaces.

Discussion: Urban Planning and Their Material and Immaterial Effects

As stated above, the production of the territory allowing visually impaired individuals to access public spaces depends on the material implementation of routes that are the responsibility of public agencies. The routes should not only be artifacts but also instruments (Folcher & Rabardel, 2004) to support mobility in public spaces; in other words, they must be appropriated by the visually impaired in their everyday activities. Consequently, the tactile tiles needed also immaterial qualities since they need to communicate with different users and support safer and more autonomous movement in space.

The implementation of tactile floorings, especially in the urban areas of Florianópolis, demonstrates that a more “technocentric practice” is still hegemonic in the community of urban planners, architects, and technicians. Their results are materialized in streets, pathways, and squares with inadequate positioning of routes, and tiles with inverted functions leading to obstacles, such as lamp-posts or dangerous holes, or to nowhere at all. In this way, they are no longer tools for visually impaired people, as their materiality in public spaces is considered untrustworthy and even associated with potential danger. One blind user claims that it is safer not to use them at all, since a single tactile tile implemented in the wrong way, or badly maintained, compromises the credibility of all the others. In these cases the materiality of the artifacts symbolizes the social and political exclusion of impaired citizens, operated by the very public agents who should be guaranteeing their social inclusion through creating accessibility to public spaces.

As described previously, accessible pathways were implemented in a prosperous area of the city, acting as an incentive to and as publicity for the tourist marketing of the city and to attract visitors and investors. The city with “the highest standards of living” in Brazil was also thus projected as an inclusive city through the presence of urban tactile flooring: the height of modernity. As Madanipour (2005) shows, European cities also try to attract tourists and investors through revitalization projects directing public resources to central or historic areas. The challenge however is to strive to combine these investments with the social needs of other areas, which does not seem to be the case of Florianópolis. The urban region chosen, and the technical errors committed, is revealing of the choices in the management process and the lack of active participation by visually impaired representatives in the project despite their utilization for the city marketing.

The planning institution professionals who take the technical decisions and have knowledge seem to consider the participation of impaired citizens as a hindrance, even though they are legally required to. Their nonparticipation is also a way to control the existing conflicts. Nothing seems more natural if we consider the Brazilian traditional way of delivering public services where primacy is given to technical instances (Paoli, 2007) when conducting public actions and social projects. According to Paoli (2007), “avoiding the emergence of the country’s political reality by disqualifying conflict and valuing science as an efficient and authoritarian tool seems to be one of the oldest and most recurrent strategies in Brazil” (p. 224). Paoli shows how technical knowledge is used to subdue the political actions of inhabitants of the peripheral areas of São Paulo (Rizek as quoted in Paoli, 2007), in the case of the self-build housing process. Some of the mechanisms employed involve “consultants, architectural offices and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who in each case control the administration of resources and finances up to the political representation of the social movements” (p. 222).

Today we can still see material traces of the situations previously discussed regarding accessibility questions in Florianópolis,¹⁰ reflected in the multiplication of errors, such as guidance routes leading to obstacles and application of tactile tiles ignoring technical norms (see Figures 1 -3). These errors evidence the lack of a survey capacity and of information campaigns conducted by the planning institutions.

In a way, this is due to their choices to prioritize other projects—most of which tend to be determined by economic and political factors, and also by their structural fragility, which becomes a stronger tendency when more conservative forces and neoliberal policies are introduced, thus reinforcing processes of exclusion. Thus, in practice, political decisions reinforce the adoption of exclusionist processes. The reflections of Braga (2008) on the professional practice of architects and urban planners working in the city education department elucidate how the low quality of public nurseries and schools stems from external political interference, a lack of financial resources and professional qualifications, and low wages.

This fragility of the public technical services favors political interests and economic groups and characterizes the promiscuous relationship between the “public” and “private” interests in Brazilian public administration (Oliveira, 1999). According to Dewey (1954), the real meaning of “public” is lost when social participants are excluded. There is no space for “the creative public and political invention of the city” (Paoli, 2007, p. 226); rules and control of public spaces are used to dominate the movements and by doing so “make them fit in with and strengthen the governmental logic” (p. 227)

Consequently, if we cast a critical eye over the inclusion process of visually-impaired citizens in Florianópolis, we find public actions that seem almost schizophrenic. There was an initial attempt to develop urban accessibility projects to enable the inclusion rights guaranteed by law to the visually impaired; however, at the same time exclusion was created through incorrect solutions constantly being implemented by the public services. In conclusion, one must agree with Kitchin’s (1998) argument that disability is a sociospatial construct and that space is instrumental in the reproduction, sustenance, and resistance of disablist practices.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Bios

Marta Dischinger is an associate professor at the Architecture and Planning Department of the Federal University of Santa Catarina, where she has worked since 1985. She has an MFA in design from HDK—Göteborg University, Sweden, and a PhD in architecture from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. She has worked in the field of inclusive design since 1991, coordinating research studies and practical design projects regarding the accessibility of urban environments and public buildings, the design of assistive technology for children’s rehabilitation and their inclusion in education, and the industrial design of tactile tiles in ceramic and polymeric materials.

José Marçal Jackson Filho has been at FUNDACENTRO (Brazilian Institute of Occupational Health and Safety) since 1988. He obtained his doctoral degree in ergonomics at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris. His research interests are in the development of ergonomic methods and practice in design processes and in the study of the work activities in the public sector and its relationship with the implementation of public policies. He is one of the scientific editors of the Revista Brasileira de Saúde Ocupacional (Brazilian Journal of Occupational Health).

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