Rob Imrie
Biographic Data
| ID | 3603766 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rob Imrie |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rob |
| FAMILY NAME | Imrie |
| SIGNATURE | IMRIE R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Royal Holloway University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9866-6895 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 666 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Design, disability, and embodiment: Spatial justice and perspectives of power
Designing disability: Symbols, space, and society
Designing Disability explores the conceptualisation of disability and access through the context of the International Symbol of Access (ISA). The ISA was commissioned as part of a competition organ
Care and Design: Bodies, Buildings, Cities
Doing disability differently: An Alternative Handbook on Architecture, Dis/Ability and Designing for Everyday Life
Jos Boys has written an excellent book that explores the interrelationships between architecture and people’s everyday occupation of space. Her focus is the significance of space, and processes of
Shared Space and the Post-politics of Environmental Change
While the design of urban space provides an opportunity to create places sensitised to the manifold complexities of the body, places continue to be designed with little understanding of the interrelationships between design, disability and space. One issue is the absence of embodied knowledge about impairment in urban design, and the understanding of disability as an aberration, not intrinsic to the crafting of well-designed environments. With th…
Universalism, universal design and equitable access to the built environment
Purpose: The concept of universal design (UD) has acquired global significance and become orthodoxy of what is presented as the very best of design practice. This is despite limited evaluation of the theoretical content of the concept. This article seeks to redress this shortfall in knowledge by providing a critique of the theoretical and conceptual components that underpin the principles of universal design.Method: Commentary.Results: The conten…
Auto-Disabilities: The Case of Shared Space Environments
Many urban environments are being redesigned around a relatively new approach to street design termed shared space. Shared space is a traffic engineering concept that eliminates physical barriers separating motor vehicles, pedestrians, and other road users to encourage a sharing of street space. Such sharing is seen as a means to calm traffic and to create convivial urban spaces. The evidence shows that local authorities in the UK and overseas ar…
Community Governance, Critical Cosmopolitanism and Urban Change: Observations from Taipei, Taiwan
Urban policy agendas are increasingly focused on the mobilization of active citizens and the propagation of cosmopolitan identities. This reflects a growing convergence between countries in urban policy thinking and practice, and greater uniformity in the terms and concepts that are used in different countries. This article draws on empirical evidence from Taipei, Taiwan to explore the form and character of changing urban policy agendas and their…
Regenerating London: Governance, Sustainability and Community in a Global City
Regulating Design: The Practices of Architecture, Governance and Control
The practices of architecture are influenced and shaped by building regulations, codes and rules that are formulated to provide specific and predictable outcomes for all aspects of architectural production, from conceptual design to urban form. Such regulations and codes are not necessarily enshrined in law but are systematic sets of rules characterised and differentiated by authorship, context and implementation. In all instances, rules and regu…
Risk, Regulation and the Practices of Architects
There is a plethora of regulation relating to building form and performance and, seemingly, much more emphasis on risk identification and its management, particularly in relation to the processes underpinning the development and delivery of building projects. It appears that the practices of architects, like other urban design professionals, are implicated in the construction of risky objects and their mitigation by recourse to systems of manager…
Disability and the Implications of the Wellbeing Agenda: Some Reflections from the United Kingdom
A wellbeing agenda has emerged in government that seeks to promote a 'politics of happiness', in which citizens are, as the New Economics Foundation put it, 'happy, healthy, capable and engaged' (2004: 2). This article explores the wellbeing agenda in the UK, and its implications for disabled people. We argue that it is unlikely, in its present form, to contribute to the development of social theoretical, or more politically progressive, analysis…
The Interrelationships between Building Regulations and Architects' Practices
It is commonly assumed that building regulation and control is a technical activity and part of a bureaucratic machine external to the design process. For many architects building regulations are no more than a set of rules to be adhered to, and are usually seen as ephemeral, even incidental, to the creative process of design. However, the main argument of this paper suggests that the building regulations are entwined with, and are constitutive o…
The Geographies of Disability: Reflections on the Development of a Sub-Discipline
Geographers' interest in the subject of disability has traditionally been confined to particular parts of the discipline, and usually been of marginal interest to most academics. This has mirrored a broader antipathy to the study of disability in the social sciences although, in recent years, geographical scholarship about space, place and disability has proliferated. In this review article, we outline and assess the significance of this trend, a…
Independent lives and the relevance of lifetime homes
A problem for disabled people, particularly individuals dependent on the use of a wheelchair, is housing that is not easily usable due to physical barriers. A proposed solution by government is the adoption of lifetime homes (LTH) standards that are likely to become mandatory for all newly constructed dwellings in the private sector in England by 2008. It is, therefore, an appropriate time to take stock of LTH standards, and to evaluate to what e…
Demystifying disability: A review of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health
The paper describes and evaluates the theoretical underpinnings of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF), and develops the proposition that its conceptual framework provides a coherent, if uneven, guide through the competing conceptions of disability. To date, however, there has been little evaluation of the theoretical efficacy of the ICF. In seeking to redress this, the paper develops the argument that the…
"Urban Geography, Relevance, and Resistance to the "Policy Turn
Disquiet about urban geography's alleged lack of policy substance and practical relevance has resurfaced in a range of recent writings. While useful, much of the debate tends to "blame the victim," in this instance, urban geography and geographers, for the inability to generate research of relevance and interest to policy. As the paper will argue, urban geography and geographers are not "free-floating" or able to determine, without constraint, th…
Housing quality, disability and domesticity
This Special Issue of Housing Studies considers the interrelationships between disability, housing quality and the domestic environment. The papers are a product of a one‐day workshop held in June
Disability, embodiment and the meaning of the home
While aspects of the home may provide for privacy, sanctuary, security and other aspects of ‘ideal’ domestic habitation, such provisions are always conditional, contingent, never secure and likely to be challenged by, amongst other things, the onset and development of bodily impairment. However, explorations of the meaning of the home, and housing studies more generally, rarely consider the body and impairment and its interactions with domestic s…
Urban renaissance?: New Labour, community and urban policy
This study documents and assesses the core of New Labour's approach to the revitalisation of cities, that is, the revival of citizenship, democratic renewal, and the participation of communities to spearhead urban change.
Urban Renaissance?: New Labour, Community and Urban Policy
Housing Quality and the Provision of Accessible Homes
This paper describes and evaluates the reactions and responses of house-builders in England and Wales to government regulation concerning disabled people's physical access to new housing. The paper begins by discussing the role and relevance of government regulation in addressing issues of housing quality and, in particular, the housing needs of disabled people. Then, referring to postal survey and interview data, the impact and implications of P…
Architects' Conceptions of the Human Body
In this paper I develop the contention that architects rarely relate their design conceptions to the human body and its multiple forms of embodiment. Where the body is conceived of, it is usually in terms of a conception of the 'normal body', or a body characterised by geometrical proportions arranged around precise Cartesian dimensions. I describe and evaluate the content and implications of architects' conceptions of the body and embodiment, an…
Disability and Bodies as Bearers of Value
This article considers the relevance of Pierre Bourdieu's conceptions of the body to the development of disability theory. We begin by discussing the limitations of reductive conceptions of disability. In so doing, we consider how far Bourdieu's (1990) concept of habitus offers a way of bringing an analysis of the body to bear upon an understanding of the social inequalities which are core to the lives of disabled people. Through focus groups wit…
A critique without a focus’: A response to Ward’s re‐interpretation of urban politics
Governmentality and Rights and Responsibilities in Urban Policy
We deploy aspects of Foucault's concept of governmentality to discuss the argument that the recent shift towards a 'rights and responsibilities' agenda in urban policy is part of broader transformations in the rationalities and techniques of government. Following Rose, we characterise the emergent forms of urban policy as part of 'advanced liberalism' or strategies which seek to activate citizens, individually and collectively, to take greater re…
How New is the New Local Governance? Lessons from the United Kingdom
In recent times, a conventional wisdom concerning the governance of cities has emerged. It revolves around the contention that policy and planning frameworks are increasingly closed off from public and democratic accountability, in order to facilitate the pursuit of efficiency over equity objectives. The implication is that ‘old’ styles of governance were more open and accountable, while the ‘new’ seek to close off debate and streamline procedure…
Architects' Conceptions of the Human Body
In this paper I develop the contention that architects rarely relate their design conceptions to the human body and its multiple forms of embodiment. Where the body is conceived of, it is usually in terms of a conception of the 'normal body', or a body characterised by geometrical proportions arranged around precise Cartesian dimensions. I describe and evaluate the content and implications of architects' conceptions of the body and embodiment, an…
Disability and Bodies as Bearers of Value
This article considers the relevance of Pierre Bourdieu's conceptions of the body to the development of disability theory. We begin by discussing the limitations of reductive conceptions of disability. In so doing, we consider how far Bourdieu's (1990) concept of habitus offers a way of bringing an analysis of the body to bear upon an understanding of the social inequalities which are core to the lives of disabled people. Through focus groups wit…
Ableist Geographies, Disablist Spaces: Towards a Reconstruction of Golledge's 'Geography and the Disabled
Geographers have only recently started to research and write about the experiences of people with disabilities, yet there is some evidence that they are replicating some of the more problematical aspects of what we might term an 'ableist sociology'. Its main features are the utilization of conceptions of disability which are reducible to the functional limitations of people with disabilities, the assertion of the normality (and naturalness) of ab…
Disability, embodiment and the meaning of the home
While aspects of the home may provide for privacy, sanctuary, security and other aspects of ‘ideal’ domestic habitation, such provisions are always conditional, contingent, never secure and likely to be challenged by, amongst other things, the onset and development of bodily impairment. However, explorations of the meaning of the home, and housing studies more generally, rarely consider the body and impairment and its interactions with domestic s…
Disability and Discourses of Mobility and Movement
In this paper I seek to make a contribution to 'geographies of mobility' by arguing that assumptions of unrestricted movement and mobility in contemporary Western societies are hegemonic in prioritising specific bodies and modes of mobility and movement. In particular, mobility and movement are defined through 'normalising' discourses which serve to alienate impaired bodies and to prioritise what one might term the 'mobile body'. This has the eff…
Focusing on Disability and Access in the Built Environment
This paper provides a documentation and discussion of the diverse experiences that different disabled people have with regards to access in the built environment. It begins by outlining the various ways in which disabled people's access needs and requirements are articulated in public policies and practices towards the development and regulation of the built environment. As the material indicates, disabled people's needs are poorly articulated an…
The Geographies of Disability: Reflections on the Development of a Sub-Discipline
Geographers' interest in the subject of disability has traditionally been confined to particular parts of the discipline, and usually been of marginal interest to most academics. This has mirrored a broader antipathy to the study of disability in the social sciences although, in recent years, geographical scholarship about space, place and disability has proliferated. In this review article, we outline and assess the significance of this trend, a…
Disabling Environments and the Geography of Access Policies and Practices
Writings about disabled people are usually aspatial or lack geographical frames of reference. This is curious because geography is fundamental to an understanding of the social, economic, and political opportunities and/or constraints underpinning the lives of disabled people. This paper develops the contention that geographical and/or spatial terms of reference are important in understanding disabled people's lives. In developing this point, the…
Barriered and Bounded Places and the Spatialities of Disability
The papers in this Special Issue of Urban Studies consider, in their contrasting ways, the spatialities of disability and disabled people's barriered and bounded lives. The papers provide a range of insights into geographies of identity formation, while seeking to (re)assert the power of territoriality by putting "the place (and historical specificity) back into displacement" (Bammer, 1994, p. xiv; quoted in Pratt, 1998, p. 27). This introduction…
"Urban Geography, Relevance, and Resistance to the "Policy Turn
Disquiet about urban geography's alleged lack of policy substance and practical relevance has resurfaced in a range of recent writings. While useful, much of the debate tends to "blame the victim," in this instance, urban geography and geographers, for the inability to generate research of relevance and interest to policy. As the paper will argue, urban geography and geographers are not "free-floating" or able to determine, without constraint, th…
The new managerialism in local governance: North-South dimensions
In recent times, a wave of public sector reforms has swept through developed, developing and transitional countries, prompting observers to herald the emergence of a 'new public management revolution'. However, this tendency, while evident across a range of nations, both North and South, is a complex, highly uneven and contradictory process. Indeed, we concur with, and seek to develop, the point by Polidano, who notes that it can 'be argued that …
Work Decentralisation from Large to Small Firms: A Preliminary Analysis of Subcontracting
This paper is a preliminary review of small firm subcontracting. It is argued that increasingly subcontracting and other forms of small firm activities are becoming a central part of the operations of large firms. As a result, small firms have to be viewed as central elements in the economy. In this paper three issues are reviewed as a prerequisite to empirical research. First, an outline is presented of theoretical proposals on interfirm linkage…
Housing Quality and the Provision of Accessible Homes
This paper describes and evaluates the reactions and responses of house-builders in England and Wales to government regulation concerning disabled people's physical access to new housing. The paper begins by discussing the role and relevance of government regulation in addressing issues of housing quality and, in particular, the housing needs of disabled people. Then, referring to postal survey and interview data, the impact and implications of P…
Auto-Disabilities: The Case of Shared Space Environments
Many urban environments are being redesigned around a relatively new approach to street design termed shared space. Shared space is a traffic engineering concept that eliminates physical barriers separating motor vehicles, pedestrians, and other road users to encourage a sharing of street space. Such sharing is seen as a means to calm traffic and to create convivial urban spaces. The evidence shows that local authorities in the UK and overseas ar…
Regulating Design: The Practices of Architecture, Governance and Control
The practices of architecture are influenced and shaped by building regulations, codes and rules that are formulated to provide specific and predictable outcomes for all aspects of architectural production, from conceptual design to urban form. Such regulations and codes are not necessarily enshrined in law but are systematic sets of rules characterised and differentiated by authorship, context and implementation. In all instances, rules and regu…
Disability and the Implications of the Wellbeing Agenda: Some Reflections from the United Kingdom
A wellbeing agenda has emerged in government that seeks to promote a 'politics of happiness', in which citizens are, as the New Economics Foundation put it, 'happy, healthy, capable and engaged' (2004: 2). This article explores the wellbeing agenda in the UK, and its implications for disabled people. We argue that it is unlikely, in its present form, to contribute to the development of social theoretical, or more politically progressive, analysis…
Business Organisations, Local Dependence and the Politics of Urban Renewal in Britain
Throughout the 1980s, the British cities witnessed an expansion in local economic development policies, characterised by proactive local government developing wideranging strategies primarily in trying to attract internationally mobile capital (Keating, 1991, 1993; Valler, 1991). A combination of cutbacks in central state-directed spatial policies, the increased hypermobility of capital and ® scal retrenchment in local government, left many local…
The Wrong Side of the Tracks: A case study of local economic regeneration in Britain
This paper examines some of the key interrelationships between policies of urban renewal and processes of local economic development in Britain. The paper considers a crucial, yet curiously neglected, area of study, the direct distributive costs of urban regeneration strategies. We develop the argument that contemporary urban policy not only fails to address many of the strategic issues connected to the distributive consequences of policy, but is…
Urban Policy Processes and the Politics of Urban Regeneration
Shared Space and the Post-politics of Environmental Change
While the design of urban space provides an opportunity to create places sensitised to the manifold complexities of the body, places continue to be designed with little understanding of the interrelationships between design, disability and space. One issue is the absence of embodied knowledge about impairment in urban design, and the understanding of disability as an aberration, not intrinsic to the crafting of well-designed environments. With th…
Law, Legal Struggles and Urban Regeneration: Rethinking the Relationships
The interrelationships between law, legal processes and urban regeneration have been little addressed by researchers of urban studies, while few have acknowledged the centrality of law as one of the core facets involved in the restructuring of the built environment. Rather, it has tended to be taken as 'given', as an underpinning of socio-institutional actions rather than being conceptualised as constitutive of them. In seeking to redress this im…
Independent lives and the relevance of lifetime homes
A problem for disabled people, particularly individuals dependent on the use of a wheelchair, is housing that is not easily usable due to physical barriers. A proposed solution by government is the adoption of lifetime homes (LTH) standards that are likely to become mandatory for all newly constructed dwellings in the private sector in England by 2008. It is, therefore, an appropriate time to take stock of LTH standards, and to evaluate to what e…
An Exploration of Disability and the Development Process
This paper explores the attitudes and practices of property developers and related agents in facilitating or constraining disabled people's access in the built environment. While acknowledging that the development process is characterised by a range of socio-institutional structures and relations which are insensitive to and ignorant of the needs of disabled people, we develop the proposition that developers' responses to disabled people are not …
Work Decentralisation from Large to Small Firms: A Preliminary Analysis of Subcontracting
This paper is a preliminary review of small firm subcontracting. It is argued that increasingly subcontracting and other forms of small firm activities are becoming a central part of the operations of large firms. As a result, small firms have to be viewed as central elements in the economy. In this paper three issues are reviewed as a prerequisite to empirical research. First, an outline is presented of theoretical proposals on interfirm linkage…
Towards a new flexible economy
Urban redevelopment, compulsory purchase, and the regeneration of local economies: The case of Cardiff Docklands
Industrial Restructuring, Labour, and Locality: The Case of the British Pottery Industry
In this paper a case study of industrial restructuring in the pottery industry is presented as an illustration of wider changes in industrial organisation in the early 1980s. The background to crisis and restructuring in the pottery industry is considered, and some of the contradictory elements in the new model of production that now characterises the industry are outlined. In conclusion, the geographical effects of economic change in the industr…
Industrial change and local economic fragmentation: The case of stoke-on-trent
The Wrong Side of the Tracks: A case study of local economic regeneration in Britain
This paper examines some of the key interrelationships between policies of urban renewal and processes of local economic development in Britain. The paper considers a crucial, yet curiously neglected, area of study, the direct distributive costs of urban regeneration strategies. We develop the argument that contemporary urban policy not only fails to address many of the strategic issues connected to the distributive consequences of policy, but is…
On the Transformative Nature of Industrial Restructuring: A Comment on Rowley
Rowley's comment offers a partial view of industrial restructuring in the British pottery industry and is too dismissive of recent theoretical developments in industrial geography. The bounded time frame of his analysis weakens his substantive criticisms of my paper and his own research has little by way of an historical referent to comment on the transformative nature of industrial restructuring in the industry
Business Organisations, Local Dependence and the Politics of Urban Renewal in Britain
Throughout the 1980s, the British cities witnessed an expansion in local economic development policies, characterised by proactive local government developing wideranging strategies primarily in trying to attract internationally mobile capital (Keating, 1991, 1993; Valler, 1991). A combination of cutbacks in central state-directed spatial policies, the increased hypermobility of capital and ® scal retrenchment in local government, left many local…
Urban Policy Processes and the Politics of Urban Regeneration
Identities, Citizenship and Power in the Cities
In this introduction to selected papers from the Tenth Urban Change and Conflict Conference (UCC), held at Royal Holloway University of London in September 1995, we offer some thoughts on the contemporary health of urban studies. UCC conferences have always been characterised by their commitment to analysing the social relations of (political) oppression and domination which underpin the dynamics of cities. This has entailed some commitment to po…
Ableist Geographies, Disablist Spaces: Towards a Reconstruction of Golledge's 'Geography and the Disabled
Geographers have only recently started to research and write about the experiences of people with disabilities, yet there is some evidence that they are replicating some of the more problematical aspects of what we might term an 'ableist sociology'. Its main features are the utilization of conceptions of disability which are reducible to the functional limitations of people with disabilities, the assertion of the normality (and naturalness) of ab…
Transforming the Social Relations of Research Production in Urban Policy Evaluation
In this paper I argue that urban-policy evaluation makes little or no difference to the lives of the communities which are the recipients or targets of urban-policy projects. In particular, I will show how processes of policy evaluation are alienating both for communities and for researchers alike. This is related, in part, to the socioinstitutional contexts within which evaluation takes place but, as importantly, to the utilisation of evaluative…
Law, Legal Struggles and Urban Regeneration: Rethinking the Relationships
The interrelationships between law, legal processes and urban regeneration have been little addressed by researchers of urban studies, while few have acknowledged the centrality of law as one of the core facets involved in the restructuring of the built environment. Rather, it has tended to be taken as 'given', as an underpinning of socio-institutional actions rather than being conceptualised as constitutive of them. In seeking to redress this im…
Urban Development Corporations and Local Governance in the Uk
This article discusses the changing nature of British urban policy in the context of upheavals in the system of local governance and their implications for urban regimes. It does this through an evaluation of urban development corporations, a policy initiative in which are embedded many of the principles of an emerging system of local governance. In particular it poses two questions: to what extent do the contours of a new local governance system…
Focusing on Disability and Access in the Built Environment
This paper provides a documentation and discussion of the diverse experiences that different disabled people have with regards to access in the built environment. It begins by outlining the various ways in which disabled people's access needs and requirements are articulated in public policies and practices towards the development and regulation of the built environment. As the material indicates, disabled people's needs are poorly articulated an…
The new managerialism in local governance: North-South dimensions
In recent times, a wave of public sector reforms has swept through developed, developing and transitional countries, prompting observers to herald the emergence of a 'new public management revolution'. However, this tendency, while evident across a range of nations, both North and South, is a complex, highly uneven and contradictory process. Indeed, we concur with, and seek to develop, the point by Polidano, who notes that it can 'be argued that …
British Urban Policy: An Evaluation of the Urban Development Corporations
The Role of Access Groups in Facilitating Accessible Environments for Disabled People
This paper considers the contrasting ways in which disabled people seek to overturn socio-attitudinal, political and physical barriers to their mobility and access requirements in the built environment. In particular, the paper documents how disabled people are attempting to influence the form and content of local authority access practices and policies in the UK, through the context and contours of access groups. I begin by briefly outlining som…
How New is the New Local Governance? Lessons from the United Kingdom
In recent times, a conventional wisdom concerning the governance of cities has emerged. It revolves around the contention that policy and planning frameworks are increasingly closed off from public and democratic accountability, in order to facilitate the pursuit of efficiency over equity objectives. The implication is that ‘old’ styles of governance were more open and accountable, while the ‘new’ seek to close off debate and streamline procedure…
Disabling Environments and the Geography of Access Policies and Practices
Writings about disabled people are usually aspatial or lack geographical frames of reference. This is curious because geography is fundamental to an understanding of the social, economic, and political opportunities and/or constraints underpinning the lives of disabled people. This paper develops the contention that geographical and/or spatial terms of reference are important in understanding disabled people's lives. In developing this point, the…
Disability and Discourses of Mobility and Movement
In this paper I seek to make a contribution to 'geographies of mobility' by arguing that assumptions of unrestricted movement and mobility in contemporary Western societies are hegemonic in prioritising specific bodies and modes of mobility and movement. In particular, mobility and movement are defined through 'normalising' discourses which serve to alienate impaired bodies and to prioritise what one might term the 'mobile body'. This has the eff…
Governmentality and Rights and Responsibilities in Urban Policy
We deploy aspects of Foucault's concept of governmentality to discuss the argument that the recent shift towards a 'rights and responsibilities' agenda in urban policy is part of broader transformations in the rationalities and techniques of government. Following Rose, we characterise the emergent forms of urban policy as part of 'advanced liberalism' or strategies which seek to activate citizens, individually and collectively, to take greater re…
A critique without a focus’: A response to Ward’s re‐interpretation of urban politics
Barriered and Bounded Places and the Spatialities of Disability
The papers in this Special Issue of Urban Studies consider, in their contrasting ways, the spatialities of disability and disabled people's barriered and bounded lives. The papers provide a range of insights into geographies of identity formation, while seeking to (re)assert the power of territoriality by putting "the place (and historical specificity) back into displacement" (Bammer, 1994, p. xiv; quoted in Pratt, 1998, p. 27). This introduction…
An Exploration of Disability and the Development Process
This paper explores the attitudes and practices of property developers and related agents in facilitating or constraining disabled people's access in the built environment. While acknowledging that the development process is characterised by a range of socio-institutional structures and relations which are insensitive to and ignorant of the needs of disabled people, we develop the proposition that developers' responses to disabled people are not …
Sociology (37 works) · Political science (34 works) · Law (26 works) · Politics (19 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Economics (17 works) · Business (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Geography (14 works) · Disability Rights and Representation (12 works)