how future urban habitats could be conceptualized to cater for an affordable and sustainable collective living and also foster the inclusion and participation of vulnerable groups in urban societies as equal players, anticipating that the mechanisms of exclusion are ever more complex.
Referring to the idea of ‘designing coexistence’, authors will also illustrate the aspects and means of ‘enabling’ and ‘empowering’ urban communities – with an understanding that the ‘included’ are to be considered as proactive, contributing stakeholders. Deciphering and anticipating both their capabilities and constraints and pursuing their participation would inform policies and socio‐spatial strategies that could act as catalysts for inclusive societies.
It is interesting to see the manifold contexts of using the word ‘inclusion’ and speculate about their common trait. The practices of inclusivity are mainly understood as mechanisms to counter the threats of ‘exclusion’ – by income, physical, or mental conditions, race, gender, class, age, sexual orientation, or others. But one could argue that inclusivity is to a certain extent in general a key characteristic and potential of cities, as a condition of dynamic and complex encounters of multiple otherness, a social, cultural, and economic market place, in which mutually beneficial performance is one of the very potential cores of urbanity. Hannah Arendt (1958) understands the condition of otherness as an essential condition of (urban) identity: ‘The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves’. Netto (2018) points at the capacities of urbanity to generate an experience of ‘difference without exclusion’. He argues that ‘a fully‐fledged urbanity would involve a sense of a permeable social world, that can bring the socially different together in places of overlapping otherness’, with the potential to – referring to Young – transcend ‘the fear of making permeable the categorical border between oneself and the others’ (Young and Allen 2011). Edward Glaeser sees a general capacity in cities to bring people together, enabling to connect, to inspire and influence each other, and to exchange ideas (Glaeser 2011).
However, one must not forget that in these idealized views of togetherness as an ostensible win‐win scenario the crucial balancing of ownership, power, and influence that would be at the core of all inclusivity and opportunities for equal participation in cities has not necessarily been taken into account. For example, Glaeser also promotes deregulation of land use as essential prerequisite for affordable housing (Glaeser 2013), thus illustrating still‐predominant neoliberal paradigms that only an unconstrained free market can cater urban development and a ‘trickle‐down urbanism’ (Tabb 2014) promised to be beneficial for all. But various authors (Madden and Marcuse 2016; Rolnik 2019) demonstrate that such aspirations and successful lobbying for deregulation, persuasion of international capital, and tax incentives for the affluent with simultaneous austerity policies (to mention a few) are rooted in exclusionary and competitive practices that have in the end often led to the complete opposite: expanding segregation and exclusion of growing groups in urban societies from the opportunities that cities could offer.
Inclusion and exclusion can thus be understood as two inherent antipodes of urbanity. Louis Wirth sees in ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’ two conflicting mechanisms similar to exclusion and inclusion at play – either ‘forces of segregation’ or ‘melting pot effects’ (Wirth 1938), noting though that the density of urban life can create neighbourhoods with the distinctive characteristics of traditional communities. Saskia Sassen (2017) argues that cities – with their ambiguity to be ‘complex, difficult to control and incomplete systems’ – have long been spaces empowering those without power to make claims, to develop a culture and an economy in their urban neighbourhoods, as ‘the spaces of the modest’. Cities succeeded here to enable ‘a bazaar culture’ as a territory that was inclusive by nature, where members of different backgrounds could trade with each other and still engage in their own cultures and religion – combined as a decisive feature of urbanity. But these centuries‐old urban capabilities are now being undermined by the extreme repositioning of cities as valuable commodities, that ‘thin out the texture and scale of spaces’ previously accessible to the collective and that threatens the capacity of the working and middle classes to find affordable housing – an indispensable foundation for their capability to participate and pursue social and economic initiatives. To describe these phenomena, Saskia Sassen (2014) uses instead of ‘exclusion’ the more compelling term ‘expulsion’ – from social security, housing, local communities, employment, ecological sustainability, and others – to describe in general global mechanisms that go far beyond the reach of local or national governments.
Armborst et al. argue as well that ‘Cities bring people together, but they're pretty good at keeping people apart too’ (Armborst et al. 2017) and see a similar dialectics as Wirth with their research on ‘Arsenals of inclusion and exclusion’ – a research on artefacts, policies, and practices that are most often deliberately instrumental in determining the level of inclusivity in cities. Christiaanse (van den Bergen and Vollaard 2009) sees a duality as well in cities, as they have neighbourhoods ‘open’ and not open to all. He advocates the model of ‘Open Cities’ as scenarios of local dynamics, in which different, culturally diverse groups coexist and inclusive urban innovation and economic development happen owing to reciprocal influences. While anticipating that the city as such cannot be a solution per se to the dilemma of differences, also Netto (2018) argues that the city, as place of random encounters with ‘the other’, can be enacted as an open fabric capable to converge the socially different in situations of co‐presences, to disrupt processes of exclusion and produce permeabilities between social groups – as an important prerequisite for a ‘reciprocity of perspectives’ to emerge.
But while enabling inclusivity appears here to be a rather spatial criteria, aiming for the disruption of exclusion and the production of permeability should be on the agenda for all potential levers in the making of habitats – design, planning, social and economic practices, policies, and operations, to mention a few. They should be benchmarks not only for the inclusion, participation, and empowering of vulnerable groups like seniors or handicapped citizens but for all who are affected by systemic inequality, translating ever more acutely into unaffordability of housing as a main driver of exclusion in cities. In order to engender the ‘Open Cities’ that Christiaanse promotes, Rieniets et al. (2009) imply that coexistence could and sometimes needs to be designed. The authors advocate a design culture where spatial and social designers, activists, policymakers and other stakeholders cooperate with one another at local scales, to propose multidisciplinary designs as catalysts for sustainable and inclusive urban developments, that balance, moderate, and amplify each other's capabilities.
Inclusive Design
Originally, inclusive design as an established practice has been predominantly discussed in the context of products, services and places catering disabled or senior citizens or other vulnerable groups requiring special environs, care and support, but it is interesting to uncover its narrative and understand if its criteria might in general inform an inclusion‐minded design and planning culture. Coleman et al. (2003) contextualize the origins of inclusive design paradigms in a period where a growing sensitivity and politization of designers regarding social aspects coincided with increasing citizen activism pushing for more awareness and participation. The authors refer to the exemplary initiatives of black citizens in the USA against discrimination, that led to the Supreme Court decision in 1954 that ‘separate is not equal’, to condemn any kind of segregation due to one's background; a precedent spurring in general campaigns for inclusion, equality, and broader civil liberties. Design thinkers such as Victor Pappanek, one of the first to point out at the social issues in the design world, co‐curated in 1976 the groundbreaking London conference ‘Design for Need’, which initiated a discussion on the social aspects of design and the idea of ‘designing out disability’ (Bicknell and McQuiston 1977). Such changing social and political aspirations and design thinking were followed by respective legislation and regulations with the intent to create frameworks for a more inclusive society. A rationale for design that is inclusive rather than exclusive (Coleman et al. 2003) emerged that moved away from favouring special solutions for the ‘excluded’ in segregated settings, but aimed to increase accessibility and inclusivity in liveable