Designed to disable? Disability- friendliness of Buffalo city municipal amenities in discourse and experience

Abstract

According to the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), the prerequisite of accessibility for people with physical disabilities goes beyond merely ensuring that there are “disabled friendly” resources in a built environment. Accessibility entails the availability of appropriate facilities to accommodate physical disabilities where and when needed. A casual observation of many municipal amenities in South Africa, particularly Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality (BCMM), Eastern Cape, shows that the conceptualisation and design of many public amenities make these amenities "public" only in name and, from a disability point of view, are possibly embedded in a model that is fundamentally exclusionist. Yet few systematic studies have been carried out at the local level to confirm or refute this assumption. Utilising Elinor Ostrom’s adaptation of the concept of common pool resources - a concept which was hitherto restricted to the analysis of shared ecological resources - this study examines the extent to which inclusivity matters within the context of the design and provisioning of municipal amenities that are meant to serve the public. The analysis is based on triangulated data obtained from a mini survey of paraplegic, blind and deaf people, physical observation of the relevant amenities, and key informant interview of officials in relevant BCMM departments. The findings suggest, among other things, that there is a weak perception among municipal officials regarding the rights of people with disabilities and that the perceptions appear to be rooted in a mind-set that regards disability, rather than the ‘engineering’ of the physical (public) space, as the ‘problem’. Even so, the thinking that public infrastructure cannot be ‘altered’ to meet ‘everyone’s needs appears to permeate the municipal bureaucracy. As a result, the Municipality has only attempted to create the bare minimum of accessible environment (catering only for wheelchair users), and this despite the existence of a constitutional mandate that dictates otherwise. The study concludes from these and other findings that for municipal amenities to become common pool resources in the sense advocated by Ostrom and other scholars, a social rather than a medical model of disability must dominate municipal and bureaucratic thinking.