Give Us an Institute and We Will Raise an Accessible Barcelona

Dr. Toms Snchez Criado, Infrastructures & Participation, Munich Center for Technology in Society &
Department of Architecture, TU Munich

ICS-ULisboa -- 12 Outubro, 2016

ABSTRACT
This presentation reports on ethnographic and archival work undertaken in 2014 and 2016 at a very small
and peripheral institute, part of Barcelonas City Hall, the Institut Municipal de Persones amb Discapacitat
(IMPD): enforcing and supervising the city-wide planning and implementation of accessible urban and
transport infrastructures. Allegedly, the IMPD has been crucial for Barcelonas huge transformation into one
of the most accessible cities in the world. Officially founded in 1990merging disability-specific management
units (patronats) that emerged after the disability rights struggles in the late 1970sthis institutes main
objective has been that of offering a way for disabled people to take part in the citys planning. Indeed, the
IMPDs council is jointly managed by civil servantsmostly social workersand disabled peoples
representatives elected every 4 years. But how could such a small entity have a lasting impact on a huge
and extremely complex municipal structure? And how, in doing so, could it grant the material expression of
accessibility rights for its most vulnerable citizens? In this presentation I will seek to explain this paying
particular attention to the documentary interfaces put together to articulate interesting relationships between
the technicians and the accessibility advocates. To be more specific, not only will I seek to report on (a) on
the role of topic-specific commissions of participation, where experiential and embodied knowledge from the
disabled is documented and brought together to sensitize the architects and engineers in charge of
implementing wider municipal projects; but also on other smaller interventions, such as: (b) its regular
publications, sensitization campaigns and outreach leaflets; and (c) the work of its technicians, constantly
supervising and writing reports on the designs, materials, and implementation of different urban accessibility
projects. Building from this, I seek to foreground the IMPD as a sensitizing device, affecting in different
modes the wider implementation of an accessibility culture within the City Halls urban professionals
planning and interventions. A fragile and fallible diplomatic task of affecting peripherally the multifarious
sociomaterial articulation of accessibility arrangements, where many compromises have to be made with the
goal of making Barcelona a city for all.

SHORT BIO
Dr. Toms Snchez Criado is Senior Researcher at the Infrastructures & Participation group, Munich
Center for Technology in Society & Department of Architecture, TU Munich. He is a Social Anthropologist
with specialization in STS whose studies and publications have focused monographically on the
ethnographic exploration of care infrastructures and their open/collaborative design transformation. He is
currently working on the project Accessibility values studying how processes of expertization of Disability
Rights Movements advocates and of engagement of technical professionals, as well as policy and market
regulations of standards, might be deploying different versions of technoscientific democratization.
+ info: www.tscriado.org | www.iup.mcts.tum.de