Equity, social justice, and planning for access and disabled people: An international perspective

This paper compares and contrasts planning for disability and access in the USA and the UK. While, in the USA, individual civil rights are seen as the basis for pursuing accessible environments, that the absence of accessibility for a proportion of the population is deemed to be an infringement of a basic human liberty, in the UK there is little by way of an articulated ethical position. Indeed, successive British governments have refused to recognize that there is any infringement of human liberties, while continuing to exhort a voluntaristic pattern of provision of accessible environments. I compare and contrast these different positions and argue that mobility and access cannot be divorced from the (ethical) issues relating to civil rights and, ultimately, from questions of social justice. I relate such arguments to a consideration of the underlying statutory and practice bases of each country's environmental planning systems.