Global Resources and Promising Practices for Building and Refining Accessible and Inclusive Smart Cities from Darren Bates LLC.
Inclusion: Acknowledging and valuing people’s differences to enrich social planning, decision-making, and quality of life for everyone.
In an inclusive Smart City all residents have a sense of belonging, acceptance, and are recognized as valued and contributing members of society with a representative voice in governance.
An inclusive Smart City values all people and equitably meets the needs of all residents—including historically underserved and marginalized populations, e.g., people with disabilities, people who are aging. Real inclusion takes place when those already included in the “mainstream” learn from those who are excluded and initiate change.
One of the most important aspects that influence the
livability of cities is the capacity to be an inclusive city
that people can and want to call “Home.
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Inclusive innovation is an action. We believe in a Pittsburgh where if it’s not for all it’s not for us! It is providing equal access to products and services through the infusion of new ideas, people, and technology to meet complex challenges. From the arts to community development, to computer science; inclusive innovation is possible in everything. We know there is…
Read More“A city isn’t smart because it uses technology. A city is smart because it uses accessible technology to build an inclusive culture ensuring no one is left behind.” Darren Bates This post focuses on the “secret sauce” that turns the idea of a smart city into reality. Question: What’s the secret sauce? Answer: People, the people who live in the…
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These days, our cities are smarter than ever — still works in progress. With estimates suggesting that 15% of the world’s population live with disabilities (upwards of one billion people), redesigning our urban environments to be as welcoming as possible has never been more important. That’s why I’m celebrating the innovations that are making Smart Cities more inclusive and accessible. From clever…
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Photo of Nabil Eid Written by Eng. Nabil Eid. Strategic Disability Inclusion ICT Accessibility consulting services & solutions Middle East and North Africa. Today, 54 per cent of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 66 per cent by 2050. Projections show that urbanization combined with the overall growth of the world’s…
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This article is about the “one voice” smart cities. It is about the cities we live in, the cities of the future and the people who make decisions about them, and the impact that excluding women and diversity from the debate will have in cities and in our world. The Right to the City Starting up my research in smart…
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Beth Blauer, Founder of GovEx at Johns Hopkins University, Kate Garman, Smart City Coordinator for the City of Seattle, and Erie Meyer, Senior Director of National Network at Code for America, describe the importance of digital and cultural inclusivity for the future of smart cities.
On November 14, The Washington Post brought together city officials, urban strategists, innovators and technologists to discuss and debate the advancements that are shaping the future of cities across the country.
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Engineers, innovators, students and people with disabilities came together as
part of Enable Makeathon 2.0, to discuss the use of technology to build a
more inclusive society.
This is an initiative of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)
and its partners, and this year’s focus is on crowd-sourcing prototype
products and solutions to address the challenges regarding accessibility and
employability of people with different disabilities, ranging from vision,
hearing and mobility….
Smart Cities for the Blind Posted by Lena Jukna on Nov 16, 2017 categories: Smart City tags: Accessibility, Blind, Inclusivity, smart city, Smart Technology, Urban Mobilty, Visual Impaired Would you be able to find your way across a big city at rush hour if you were visually impaired? 285 million visually impaired people worldwide are facing this challenge every day,…
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South Korea-based startup specialises in innovative solutions for the blind.
It has created products that are low cost, small and easy to carry.
The Dot Smartwatch, which claims to be the world’s first Braille smartwatch,
lets the blind receive real time information from their phone, such as
notifications, text messages, and Facebook messages in braille.
The smartwatch vibrates when there is a notification on the phone and the
user cans elect and read the messages in Braille. This way the blind are
connected, like everyone else….
Like many other fast-growing urban centers, my hometown of Austin, TX has reached a historic tipping point triggered by Austin’s rapid urbanization. Austin City Leadership recognizes it must engage in vastly new approaches to adjust and calibrate to social and economic challenges amplified by the lightning speed of technical and industrial advances. To address these challenges, Austin is taking a big leap into the Smart City pond….
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How should we design disability-inclusive cities?
Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez’s picture
Submitted by Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez On Mon, 12/04/2017
co-authors: Shazia Siddiqi
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Urbanization has been one of the most significant driving forces of recent global development, with more than half the world’s population now living in cities. And this proportion will continue to rise. Add to this, the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal 11 that calls for “inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” cities.
In this edition of the Sustainable Communities Blog, Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez (@Ede_WBG), Senior Director of the World Bank’s Social, Urban, Rural and Resilience Global Practice, sat down with Dr. Shazia Siddiqi, Executive Director of Deaf Abused Women’s Network (DAWN), for a conversation on the disability dimension of inclusion and how we should conceive and design cities that are truly inclusive of all, including persons with disabilities.
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Tiffany Yu, founder of Diversability, talks about how exclusion is more disabling to a person than an actual disability and why employers should hire people with disabilities because of their strengths, not to meet a quota.
The #InequalityIs campaign by the Ford Foundation is a yearlong conversation about inequality in all its forms.
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Last fall, Darren Walker wrote an essay urging all of us to acknowledge our personal biases and to understand how those biases can fuel injustice and inequality. Darren’s call grew out of his own awakening: the realization, brought to light by friends and activists, that for all the foundation’s attention to challenging inequality, we hadn’t accounted for the huge community of people living with disabilities. It was a humbling moment, he wrote.
As the past year has shown, it has also proved to be a consequential one. It quickly became clear that our focus on inequality demands that we think seriously about disability issues. It became equally clear that across all our programs, the specific outcomes and goals we’re working to achieve simply cannot be accomplished without addressing the needs, concerns, and priorities of people with disabilities. And so, guided by the disability movement’s mantra, “Nothing about us without us,” we’ve been working to confront ableism and expand participation and inclusion on both the institutional and the individual levels. It turned out we had a lot to learn.
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World Disability Day is today – Why it Matters We all know the statistics. Over a billion people, that’s nearly 15% of the world’s population, are disabled. About 80% of them live in the developing world. In India, the disabled population is officially estimated to be nearly 21 million, although various policy papers place the figure at almost double of…
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Today is International Day of People with Disability. I’ve been doing a lot of work in my hometown for the Day these past few days. I was interviewed by The Border Mail – the article is here. It made front page of the paper paper!
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In order for businesses and governments to remain relevant and competitive in today’s marketplace, it is necessary to adopt a global mindset. There have been numerous discussions, deliberations and debates that outline the importance of creating a more cross-cultural, inclusive and diverse work force. Most of these discussions have led to the conclusion that diversity and inclusion at workplace reap immense benefits including greater customer satisfaction, better market position, an enhanced ability to reach strategic goals and a stronger bottom line. I couldn’t agree more.
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The Global Alliance on Accessible Technologies and Environments (GAATES) is the leading international organization dedicated to the promotion of accessibility of the built and virtual environments and to promoting the Guiding Principles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), adopted in December 2006.
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In this episode, we talk with deaf-blind civil rights lawyer and accessibility advocate Haben Girma about accessible justice and how designing courts, law firms, and the attorney-client relationship for people with disabilities can increase access to justice for everyone.
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“When you book a hotel and want an accessible room, you need to really know what that means and if it will meet your needs,” Wandke said.
But the travel industry is not set up to do this. Not only are websites often ill-equipped to allow people to select rooms that meet specific physical requirements, even when customers call, hotel staff frequently don’t know what their facility has to offer or they might provide misinformation.
Wandke and Flint are hoping to solve this problem. They’re working on a website called AbiliTrek that allows travelers to find and book rooms that meet specific needs for mobility, hearing or visual challenges. They’re using crowdsourcing to build a database of reviews focused on accessibility. AbiliTrek will also call hotels to help people find suitable rooms….
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Airbnb is part of something called the sharing economy, an evolving system in which people who own certain things, like homes or cars, rent them out to others when they are not using them. In many cases, travelers can save a significant amount of money by staying at an Airbnb host’s property rather than at a hotel. Uber is another company that is part of the sharing economy. Drivers use their own vehicles to drive people around town. Despite Uber’s sometimes lax regulations and harassment and discrimination scandals, people still love using it and other services like it because of their lower prices and the ease of summoning a vehicle.
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