Misfit Bodies, Misfit Environments: A Disability-Justice Material-Discursive Understanding of Urban Informality

Abstract

Urban planning has recently started recognizing disability justice as a frame of inquiry. This paper asks for planners and academics to analytically consider all forms and scales of disablement in order to develop prioritarian and comprehensive as well as dynamic, multi-dimensional and relational approaches towards planning interventions intended for the “margins ” in the service of justice. While Global South critical disability theorists have begun to conceptually formulate the imposition of disablement and debilitation through a politics of impairment lens, this paper particularly centers the case-study of an individual with a profound intellectual disability encountering the materiality of an urban informal settlement. Processes of disablement in the Global South and profound intellectual disability both require an emphasis on justice-beyond-rights in order to create de facto inclusion through planning interventions. This paper, in an endeavor geared specifically towards disablement in the Global South, seeks to articulate and calibrate a ‘misfit’ material-discursive understanding of environments. Through the case-study it aims to specifically gather a spatial typology for disabled environments towards thinking about urban informality.