Eighteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Inclusive and accessible design was at the core of the 2012 Olympic efforts (London Legacy Development Corporation, 2012). This approach did not only extend to the Park and the Games’ venues at the time, but to all aspects of the built environment, and into the urban re-development that came after as part of the legacy of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. To this effect, the LLDC built a guidance document to support all the stakeholders involved in this coordinated effort (LLDC, 2013). In this area, the new residential spaces, therefore, were planned, designed and constructed, applying high-level Inclusive Design provisions consistently, and to an uncommon scale for an existing urban area. These conditions, then, provided a unique opportunity to explore how these design provisions are performing when spaces are in use. Accessing their performance from the users’ perspective, is the area around which the author’s primary research revolves. In conversations with the residents, architectural design’s key role in the level of inclusion achieved at multiple scales was made clear, but not only in the expected and quite direct aspect of space definition. The findings suggest a more nuanced role of design decisions, especially around intangible dimensions of space, that can positively or negatively impact crucial social aspects, such as inclusion and integration. Using the concept of affordance, first proposed by Gibson in 1979, and its current conceptualisation and application in design (Chong and Proctor, 2020), this paper explores these findings using the researcher’s technical knowledge and participants’ reported experiences.