Watch Your Step
Temporary intervention in public spaces, marking obstacles on sidewalks to alert pedestrians to tripping hazards.
As a "Tactic to Pay Attention", painting with contrasting colors any protruding object, change in level, uneven surface that could cause pedestrians to trip and fall. It is making the invisible visible and practicing the ability to see what others miss.
Feb / 2.015
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This project won the Walking Visionaries Awards 2015 in the category Planning and Design for Livable Public Spaces. Walk21 Vienna.
We all have different preferences regarding our mobility, but there's one thing most share: at some point, we're all pedestrians.
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With the international awareness of the negative impact of human activities on the environment, including the high dependence on cars and their responsibility for the emission of polluting gases, there is a growing need for a new and powerful approach to urban planning to recreate a highly walkable and accessible city.
In this new sustainable city model, the strategy for managing public space is based on promoting the culture of walking, facilitating foot travel, improving road safety for pedestrians, ensuring universal access to public spaces and transport, developing pedestrian mobility as the primary mode of transport in urban areas, and taking all necessary measures to promote walking.
The International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is based on the paradigm of human rights and social development, focusing on the intrinsic dignity of the human being. One of the principles on which the Convention is based is universal accessibility. Art. 9 promotes the creation of conditions for persons with reduced mobility to have an accessible physical environment that allows them to move freely in urban and rural areas. Thus, universal accessibility is defined as "the condition that must achieve the environments, processes, goods and services to be understandable, usable and practicable by everyone in conditions of safety and comfort and as autonomous and natural as possible".
The different types of barriers to universal access in urban environments, in practice, turn into spatial discrimination of a large number of people who temporarily or permanently experience some kind of limitation in their mobility that prevents them from having universal access to urban space and, therefore, the recognized benefits of socialization.
We must not forget that in order to implement this new strategic approach to promote improvements in the pedestrian environment, universal accessibility is an essential requirement for full and active participation as citizens under equal conditions. Understanding that accessibility is not only a consideration for people with disabilities: it benefits all of society.
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