Alcestis P. Rodi

In 348 BCE, in his oration Against Meidias, Demosthenes described a public realm where each individual citizen could walk with their head held high, without worrying about threats to their dignity. In his endeavor to defend civic dignity in Athens, he intuitively established walking in public space as the action of, and locus for practicing dignity.

Walking in present-day Athens contrasts sharply with the conditions of the polis as envisioned by Demosthenes. The public realm can be physically and emotionally challenging, and disabled people are therefore all but excluded. Narrow pavements and ramps plagued by obstacles, faulty construction and poor maintenance, open drains, a lack of a crossing systems for the hearing impaired, and the dysfunctional parking of vehicles all make the outdoors a hostile and dangerous place. Indoor spaces are also unwelcoming and oppressive. They feature stairs up to the entrance of apartment buildings, as well as substandard corridors, elevators, and clearances. Beyond the disabled, the percentage of senior citizens within the Athenian population is currently growing at a faster rate than ever before. It is predicted that one in every three residents will be over 65 by 2050.

Dr. Alcestis P. Rodi – tenured assistant professor at the Department of Architecture, University of Patras – argues that designing public as well as private spaces for disabled people should mean designing places for dignity. In spite of regulations aimed at ensuring that all people can enter and move through spaces, the need to create physical solutions that do not separate or segregate disabled populations has been overlooked. This gap calls for a (re)generation of urban and architectural forms at all scales – from apartments to apartment buildings and from city blocks to entire neighborhoods – on the basis of a totally new agenda. Aimed at upcycling everyday environments into enabling environments, this research identifies and comparatively analyzes typologies of apartments, apartment buildings, and neighborhoods in Athens, and presents design guidelines in the hope of dignifying spaces. It investigates methods and “out-of-the-box” designs for upgrading private, common, and public space to enable access to environments through regeneration or new development.

Moreover, her research demonstrates a critical need for policymakers, architects, urban designers, developers, and homeowners to respond to dignity-based criteria such as accessibility, safety, privacy, social interaction, and flexibility in ways that transform all spaces – including homes and neighborhoods – into meaningful places serving all-inclusive communities.

This research fundamentally frames design for disability as a dignity issue. Just as alphabet systems for the blind before Braille were based on raised Roman letters – an alphabet for the sighted – design for accessibility is presently configured as merely adapting the spaces of the “universal user” for the disabled. Design for dignity instead requires a new paradigm that is not about accommodating but rather about actively designing spaces to equally include disabled people. In the future, the biggest challenge we face is to design solutions that are user-centered (for those physically and otherwise challenged), instead of using the non-disabled population as a baseline for what is acceptable or normal, and then adapting it. The current discourse, knowledge, and practice of architecture and urban design should be re-directed towards a just and noble mission: the transformation of Athens, and the world at large, into a dignified place for all.