Hello, everyone, I'm Manaswi.
I'm a PhD student at the University of Washington,
and today I'll be talking to you about urban accessibility
as a sociopolitical problem using
multi-stakeholder approach.
Let's begin with some definitions.
Urban accessibility has been studied
across several different fields, such as urban planning,
human geography, disability studies, urban sociology.
And traditionally, accessibility has
been defined as interaction between humans and lands,
and more specifically, as the ease or difficulty for people
to reach opportunities or services.
It's also strongly tied to mobility,
which looks at trip rates and proximity to destinations.
But neither of these look at the physical or mobility
differences across people, which is where disability comes in,
which is the product of dynamic interaction of human
and the environment.
The sociopolitical model of disability
shifts the focus from the individual
to the broader social, cultural, and the economic political
environment, which is the lens which we use in this paper
to study this problem.
Our focus is with people using some form of mobility aid.
And we focused on pedestrian infrastructure,
more specifically sidewalks, where
we see issues, such as missing curb ramps, surface issues,
obstacles, and so on.
We asked two big questions.
The first is, what's the sociopolitical context
of urban accessibility?
And how do we enable change within this context?
To break these big questions, we asked three specific questions
that we studied.
What are the information needs and challenges
for assessing and making decisions
around urban accessibility?
And how do people use technology for doing it?
Second, how do people communicate
and interact together to assess priorities and make decisions?
And third, where are the design opportunities
to improve the existing practices
around urban accessibility?
To study these, we did an interview study
with 25 participants across three cities,
where we interviewed five stakeholder groups,
asked them about questions around assessment approaches
and decision-making practices around accessibility.
Our stakeholders included MI individuals and caregivers,
accessibility advocates, and government officials,
such as policymakers and department officials.
Each had their own perspectives.
MI individuals cared more about safety and quality
of physical access.
Advocates represented people in need.
They fought for their needs and rights,
and they closely interacted with both the citizens
and the government.
On the government side, policymakers
were responsible for developing laws and policies.
They prioritized and distributed resources equitably,
and they managed fundings amongst different competing
issues.
While on the other side, department officials
executed policies, made accessibility improvements,
and they also did the groundwork of assessing the infrastructure
as well as making repairs.
Now across these stakeholder groups,
we had findings across four categories.
Today, we focus on two--
interactions between the different stakeholders
and the challenges that occurred,
more specifically the sociopolitical challenges.
City-scale decision making happens amongst three primary
groups--
policymakers, department officials, and advocates.
Each have their own rules when they interact with each other,
but they all come together for two main interaction goals--
setting city agendas and priorities,
as well as prioritizing investments.
Now during this process, we found
several social, political, and economic challenges,
such as lack of political will, lack of public interest,
conflicting responsibilities and priorities,
insufficient funding, inconsistent regulations.
We found that public disinterest can influence political will.
A policymaker explains by saying that at the end of the day,
it becomes a political discussion of how much money do
we think citizens are going to vote for.
How much would the population bear?
So it becomes more of a political discussion, rather
than a policy one.
Now given these challenges, how do we enable change?
What we found, in most of these challenges,
is that the key or the underlying issue
was either lack of interactions or communication failures.
In order to better facilitate these interactions,
we mapped out all of the interactions
between our stakeholders in this interaction space,
which visualizes both the similarities, as well
as the differences between the interactions
and the differences in the context within which it occurs.
This allows us to specifically explore
where civic tech can actually play a role
to improve the cross-stakeholder communication.
In our paper, we focused on two areas
which needed strengthening within urban accessibility.
One being improving community input and government feedback,
which looked into how do we improve government feedback
and increase transparency, and as a result,
sustain civic participation over time.
And second, how do we support advocacy efforts?
What types of tools do we need?
What types of interactions do we need
to improve in order to make their organizing efforts more
efficient and more effective?
For example, one of them was making
data gathering more easier.
For more details, please refer to our paper.
This brings us to the end of our talk.
I would like to thank my advisors, Jon Froehlich
and Jeffrey Heer, and my team for their tireless effort
to get it to where it is.
Thank you very much for listening to my talk.
I'm happy to take any questions.