Driving Forces and Enablers for Universal Design in Urban Planning

The built environment is still, to a large extent, not accessible and usable for all. The awareness of people's different conditions and abilities sometimes seems to be far from the agenda for planning and architecture. Universal Desing (UD) is pointed out as a strategy to achieve a built environment for all people regardless of age and abilities. UD has a radical potential to bring about change and raise attention to spatial practises that produce or reproduce exclusion and inequalities. But it is also challenging the contemporary planning discourse and several of the actual strong planning trends. Densification, mixed-use and mobility management are some of these trends that needs to be met by an elaborated practice with human diversity as a starting point. Curiosity about what universal design can mean in practice is growing among many professionals. Lack of accessibility is easy to trace, while the good examples blend naturally into the environment and are often taken for granted. It is the good examples that are decisive to achieve social goals such as equality, participation and a sustainable society. There is a need to highlight and discuss the driving forces and enablers for a UD-approach, in the different stages of processes, in the design of buildings and places and applied to different spatial scales. This paper will highlight some of these driving forces and enablers related to UD, for an in-depth discussion on the conditions to realise urban development characterised by human diversity.