In this commentary, we suggest that disability in planning practice is widely under-theorized. Planners must respond to normalized inattention to disability in the planning field and can begin doing so by engaging disability theory in practice. Five disability perspectives are discussed with a view to providing planners with a disability theory toolkit: (1) the medical, (2) social, and (3) biopsychosocial models; (4) a neoliberal viewpoint; and (5) a critical ableist studies lens. We encourage planners to embrace disability theory and the complexity of disability experiences, and to work toward unsettling the normalcy of disabled people’s exclusion in planned environments.

“What’s it like?” This question has stimulated the simulation of disability through such activities as sitting in a wheelchair, putting in ear plugs, or putting on a blindfold. Disability simulatio...

This paper explores the perception of inaccessibility as it reflects the cultural education of the sensorium. Following Gilroy, sensorium is taken here to mean the dense weave of historical experience that organizes the relations among the senses and perception itself. With this concept, I examine texts related to accessibility management at a large Canadian University. These texts include a 2017-18 email exchange regarding accessibility between a subway station and a university building, as well as the first policy statement on 'The University and Accessibility for Disabled Persons' from 1981. Through these texts, I show how people, now as then, are taught to sense disability as excludable. The paper demonstrates how the sensorium is educated to exclude a concern for the history, responsibility, as well as the touch of the actual physical environment. In pursuit of a re-education of the sensorium, this paper reveals how disabled people are sensed as potentially includable in the future while excludable in the present.