The transformation of land into parceled, commodified, and financed units of property occupies a central role in disputes over political rights within the United States. Far from being a neutral abstraction of space, real property is laced with specific ideas about ownership and subjectivity that reinforce one another. Discussions of property, subjectivity, and rights are wide-ranging, from legal briefs to theoretical concepts.1 Past and contemporary litigation by Black and Indigenous Americans over the inequities built into the histories of American property reveals how land ownership has been used as a blunt instrument: it overdetermines people’s relationships to space, their ability to acquire financial security and wealth, and their physical and social relationships to one other.
In comparison to the sophisticated analyses of the settlement and racialization of land, those on the disability politics of property have been far more limited. Rather than challenge property as such through alternative forms of ownership or the restitution of land (among other possibilities), scholars and activists representing disabled perspectives and experiences tend to find themselves arguing simply for physical transformations to individual properties. In the United States, the politics of disability and property focuses on demanding that those who own it improve its physical utility and functionality through increasing disabled “access.” This use of the term “access” emerges from late-modern design and is defined as the ease of use of a space or artifact and, in disability contexts, physical freedom.2 The efforts of the Berkeley-based Independent Living Movement in the 1970s, as well as the 1990 passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, were significant achievements in expanding access and developing the spatial strategies that define it in the United States.
As both a complement and contrast to the above, a disability critique of property examines how the transformation of space into property intersects with concepts about, as well as histories of, disability and disablement. Like constructs of race and indigeneity in US society, disability is partially defined and established relative to concepts and histories of property. This includes centuries’ old writings regarding the sense of selfhood underpinning land settlement and ownership in the United States; the ways certain property typologies generated and exacerbated disabilities both intentionally and incidentally; and the way specific physical forms of development have been contested and negotiated by disabled people.
Concepts and Histories
In North America, the term “property” refers to both a physical thing that is owned and a concept about the physical and mental capacities of its creators. This latter idea was formed in philosophical writings on property as well as legal cases that determined control over property in seventeenth-century British colonies. In his influential Second Treatise on Civil Government, John Locke argued that physical capacity is a prerequisite for the creation of property. For Locke, people created and claimed property out of North America’s unowned “wastelands” by improving them through their physical labor. More than a philosophical reflection, his perspectives informed the settlement of the Carolinas and influenced colonial policy. In the colonial era of the United States, the image of the young, hale, white male settler clearing forested land, sowing crops, and constructing a small cabin on his property solidified this idea of property.3 Architects from the nineteenth century to the present have elaborated this representation of property and selfhood in their work: from Andrew Jackson Downing’s and Andrew Jackson Davis’s drawings of crafted wooden cottages surrounded by tidy yards, to late-modernist country residences such as Philip Johnson’s steel frame and brick Glass House set on a mowed clearing of green grass among forest and stone walls.
For Locke, the opposite of property was unimproved land (what he called “wastelands”), and the flipside of the settler was not, as one might presume, the continent’s indigenous inhabitants, but people with impairments. Locke argued that any free man could create and possess property, but he viewed physical and cognitive impairment as a barrier to the civil society of property owners he imagined. The historian Stacy Clifford Simplican describes Locke’s writings on impairment and social participation as the “capacity contract.” This term describes Locke’s extensive set of reflections on how impairments preclude entrée into public life. These theories mirrored actual legal practices: the earliest recorded physically and cognitively disabled British colonist, Benoni Buck of Jamestown, Virginia, is also the first recorded settler to lose control of property because he was deemed non compos mentis (of “unsound mind”). Buck’s court-appointed guardian assumed control of his assets, and some accused his guardian of leveraging colonial law to acquire them.4
These seemingly antiquated concepts about individual rights continue into the present. Today, a person’s disability threatens their ability to maintain their economic autonomy. A person with serious and permanent physical or cognitive impairments needs to demonstrate that they have the mental or physical competency to care for both themselves and their surroundings, despite those impairments. People with disabilities in the United States who cannot demonstrate this face various forms of state-ordered supervision or institutionalization. Disabled people have resisted their institutionalization ever since such institutions were first established, but a deeper confrontation with the conceptual underpinnings of these legal practices is long overdue. Locke’s theories may have been developed hundreds of years ago, but his ideas about property and capacity are still interrelated in essential, juridical ways.
Entrance to Red Lake Reservation, Minnesota, 1931. Source: Digital Public Library of America.
Property is also a relationship formed between people and space that can incapacitate by design. Two of the United States’ most brutal nineteenth century landscape typologies illustrate this: the plantation and the reservation. Both of these spaces were designed to inhibit the movement and independence of their non-white inhabitants by either expropriating their land or making them property. Historians Susan Burch, Jenifer Barclay, and lawyer Ella Callow have each recovered histories of many people diagnosed with disabilities within these spaces.5 Their work demonstrates how the reservation and plantation systems informed definitions and diagnoses of disability, which were handed down by plantation owners, doctors, and courts. They also recovered episodes that demonstrate the agency of people with impairments resisting their subjugation in these settings. Callow, for instance, recounts how a resident of the South Dakota Rosebud Reservation, Alvin Abner Big Man, was diagnosed with “horse stealing mania” by a reservation agent and committed to the Canton Asylum in North Dakota. Similarly, Barclay recovered the history of Amy Booker, a woman enslaved on a Virginia plantation who was diagnosed as “lame” and therefore unable to perform field labor. She assumed a role as a caregiver and leader on the plantation, within a community of people threatened with constant sale and displacement.
Dorothea Lange, “Cabins for sugarcane workers, Bayou La Fourche, Louisiana,” 1937. Source: Library of Congress.
Today, many US reservations and many of the populated areas around former plantation sites contain a higher percentage of disabled residents than the national average.6 These spaces are remote from healthcare centers, and their residents’ relative lack of wealth and political clout make them vulnerable to dangerous forms of land development. The recent protests at Standing Rock against the Keystone XL Pipeline reveal the way government and industry make residents of these landscapes vulnerable to environmental pollution. And the region nicknamed “Cancer Alley”—a string of former nineteenth century plantations between Baton Rouge and New Orleans—has also been the site of extensive, state-supported, petrochemical development since the 1920s. Cancer Alley, which has a high concentration of disease (hence its nickname), is an epicenter of contemporary activism addressing environmental justice, historic preservation focused on maintaining the burial sites of enslaved people, and demands for environmental reclamation and economic restitution.7 These places, and others like them, remain in the peripheries of disability history, but contending with the legacies of reservation and plantation landscapes is critical to future work on disability, architecture, and landscape history.
The development of Berkeley in 1915. Source: Berkeley Historical Society.
Specific physical characteristics of property development also intensify experiences of impairment through the way they isolate people, create economic precarity, and privatize access to land. Over the past decade, architectural historians have developed increasingly sophisticated racial and gendered critiques of two of the primary architectural forms of land development and property production in the twentieth-century United States: the residential tract (“suburb”) and the multi-story building (“skyscraper”). Governments and developers used these property typologies to transform the physical, racial, and economic characteristics of neighborhoods, land ownership, and the concentration of wealth.8 By contrast, most historic and contemporary disability critiques of suburban neighborhoods and multi-story buildings concentrate on how difficult they are to use by disabled people. From the 1950s to 1970s, university and government researchers reimagined single-family homes and multi-story apartment buildings as sites of “independent living.” Researchers at the University of Illinois, University of Connecticut, and University of California, Berkeley mocked-up elements of single-family homes and apartment interiors in design laboratories to arrive at ideal designs for disabled people. In Berkeley, the birthplace of the Independent Living Movement, disabled people together with the UC Berkeley architect Raymond Lifchez explored ways to add inexpensive ramps to single-family homes, reconfigure bathrooms and kitchens, and install complex pieces of medical equipment within residential buildings, among other design strategies.9
Despite the significance of the Independent Living Movement’s work, it was often siloed away from other forms of activism in Berkeley that was concurrently developing a critique of land development practices on residential blocks, beyond the accessibility of houses. For example, several neighborhood groups in Berkeley petitioned to have areas of their blocks transformed into communal property. The most famous of these campaigns was the 1969 occupation and transformation of a large vacant lot near UC Berkeley into “People’s Park.” Other, less celebrated examples of transforming private land into public space in Berkeley include the creation of the inter-block Ohlone Park in the 1970s and Greg Brown Park in the 1980s. Both were created in relatively dense areas of single-family homes and apartment buildings. In addition to these neighborhood groups, statewide activism by the California Coastal Alliance in the 1970s established a network of easements that maintained existing access points to the ocean as beachfront land was being developed into private homes. Eventually, the Coastal Alliance became the California Coastal Commission, which established state laws that mandated the construction of affordable housing near the ocean.10
Strategies and Practices
While the mantras of “access” and “independence” have long fueled the activism of disabled people as they confront private and government property owners, this always had its limitations. A more thorough disability critique of property explores strategies that rethink property itself—beyond and sometimes against its use and sole ownership. Access simply affords one use of property, and the focus on disability independence often instantiates social relations endemic to property creation and development. As the case of Berkeley illustrates, members of the Independent Living Movement fought to use single-family homes while others in the city sought to limit the expansion and power of this type of development. Many histories of disability and design valorize the work that emerged from the Independent Living Movement. More critical ones note that their focus on access and independence reflects more conservative desires for mobility and autonomy in postwar middle class culture.11
Wheelchair accessible ramp in Badlands National Park, South Dakota. Photo: National Park Service/Brad Barker.
Since the passage of the Americans with Disability Act in 1990, disability advocates have explored ways to extend strategies of access into more unusual spaces and landscapes in the United States, such as through the concept of “accessible wilderness”12 The aesthetics of accessible wilderness often involve landscape designs with prominent ramps and wheelchair accessible paths running through (and set against) a surrounding empty natural area. Native tribes contest the term “wilderness” in national park planning with its narratives of emptiness, and have sought to limit access of the non-native public to their remaining cultural sites in these areas. Today, some tribes are also seeking restitution and co-management of national park lands.13 A more incisive disability politics focused on “access” at such sites would consider the politics and aesthetics of access itself.
A first step in many restitution processes involves non-native populations agreeing to limit both their access to and use of contested landscapes. The Americans with Disabilities Act allows limitations to access when it would interfere with the aesthetic integrity of a registered historic structure or landscape, but the law is vague when addressing the potential for access to negatively impact the cultural and historical meaning of spaces. It may sound bizarre for disabled people to limit the accessibility of some public lands. Yet, disabled Americans—a population that includes a disproportionate number of Native Americans—understand that access is never a given, and that it is a social and power relation negotiated between people. In this context, advocates of a disability-led form of land restitution might promote efforts that begin to limit general access (i.e., of the non-native public) to contested land or rethink the ways access works against restitution processes.14
A structure and the path below provide access by transgressing property lines on a block in Berkeley, California. Design: Irene Cheng, David Gissen, and Brett Snyder. Photo: David Gissen.
As for demands for independence, disabled people could pursue another approach, one that Irene Cheng, Brett Snyder, and I call “disabled communalism.” This term is inspired by Mia Mingus’s concept of “access intimacy,” which emphasizes access as a politics of interdependence.15 Disabled communalism describes the way that access to space emerges from transgressing property boundaries and rights in the form of easements, shared ownership, and connections between separately owned properties. The concept of disabled communalism was developed as a critique of the isolation, exclusions, and demographics of single-family housing in Berkeley, California, but it was also a response to historic demands by disabled people to make individual homes more accessible for potential disabled renters and owners.16 Disabled communalism builds off recent efforts in the Bay Area to rethink individual property rights, such as by creating easements through city blocks, passing legislation that ends single-family zoning, increasing the number of separately owned and rented buildings that can be built on a lot, and creating housing cooperatives that enable people to own portions of properties in neighborhoods that are otherwise unaffordable.17
Finally, a disability critique of property confronts some of the physical features of development itself. In neighborhoods like Ridgewood, Queens in New York City, residents have protested the construction of multi-story residential buildings on their blocks. Such protests are not exceptional per se, but this particular neighborhood is one of a handful in New York City that has an unusual density of low-scale buildings. Many of the structures, including residences, in the southern end of the neighborhood are only one-story tall with low stoops. This area of the neighborhood also contains a fully accessible subway station, as well as an unusually large number of public schools that cater to disabled students. In its current state, it offers a vision of a New York City neighborhood that is much less burdensome for its disabled residents than many other areas of the city, intentionally or not.
Rather than towers, the neighborhood’s residents’ have increased its density through self-initiated improvements that increase the use of the area’s existing structures and lots. Many buildings have large openings (originally built for vehicles) that open directly onto the street and provide a porch-like space. Some of the taller one-story structures have lofted areas built into their interiors, and several of the one-story houses have additional buildings built behind them or connect to an adjacent lot on their sides. All of these strategies suggest ways to build out and across properties, and are a response to intensive multi-story construction that often (and ironically) reduces housing density, drives up surrounding rents, and reduces accessibility (elevators often break down).18 The improvements and activism in Ridgewood are not being driven by disabled people, but they suggest that alliances can be made between those seeking controls on intensive development and those exploring what a disability critique of cities might be today.
Ultimately, these various histories and strategies offer ways to challenge the sense of selfhood that lies at the heart of property in the United States: the hale individual (almost always white, young, and male) who traverses and claims space through physical effort and intensity. When associated with the writing of Locke, this type of physical subject recalls the violent settlement of land in the United States. But this subject and his physicality is also upheld in many forms of activism, from squatters claiming abandoned buildings and celebrations of trespass in radical writings on property to prominent ways that disabled people accessed space by smashing curbs with sledgehammers.19 If property is made via the physical exertion of men, and if the physicality of property is haunted by this subject, then these concepts demonstrate how a consideration of incapacities might construct an alternative relationship to one’s surroundings—one that limits the power of property as such. This alternative emphasizes relationships to buildings and their grounds that uphold practices of restitution, re-appropriation, easement, sharing, and building across and out, among many other possibilities. These are all spatial strategies, but they are also all ways to reimagine relationships to each other in our surroundings. They offer ways to extricate ourselves from an overbearing and violent aspect of selfhood that is foundational to the United States.
This includes the way “whiteness” functions in US history as a property relationship. See Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review, June 10, 1993, 1707-1791; for theoretical examinations of property, see N. Blomley, Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property (London: Routledge, 2003) and Daniel Loick, The Abuses of Property (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2023).
On the concept of “access” in design practices, see Aimi Hamraie, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). The politics of property in discussions of disability and space is limited, but adjacent critical analyses include Rob Imrie, Disability and the City (London: Sage, 1996); Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); and David T Mitchell, The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015).
See John Locke, “V. Of Property,” in Second Treatise on Civil Government, in Readings in Social and Political Philosophy, ed. Robert M. Stewart (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986), 10-17; and Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
See Stacy Clifford Simplican, The Capacity Contract: Intellectual Disability and the Question of Citizenship (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Richard Neugebauer, “Exploitation of the insane in the New World: Benoni Buck, the first reported case of mental retardation in the American colonies,” Archives of General Psychiatry 44, no. 5 (1987): 481-483; and Kim Nielsen, “Property, Disability, and the Making of the Incompetent Citizen in the United States, 1860s-1940s,” in Disability Histories, eds. Susan Burch and Michael Rembis, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 308-20.
See Susan Burch, Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021); Jenifer L. Barclay, The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2021); and Anne Brice, “How the US created an insane asylum to imprison Native Americans,” UC Berkeley News, November 19, 2020.
According to the last census, the national average of self-described disabled people was 13% of the US population; rates of disability among Native Americans are approximately 20%, and in St. John the Baptist Parish (in the area called “Cancer Alley”) the average is 16.5%.
For frameworks that examine the legacies of former plantation spaces, see Katherine McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe 17, no. 3 (2013): 1-15; Mabel Wilson, “Carceral Architectures,” Superhumanity (e-flux Architecture, 2016); and Alexandra Eaton et al., “Searching for the Lost Graves of Louisiana’s Enslaved People,” New York Times, June 7, 2021.
On the architectural history of racialization and the single-family house, see Diane Harris, Little White Houses: How the Post-War Home Constructed Race in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); see also, Jonathan Massey, “Risk and Regulation in the Financial Architecture of American Houses,” in Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century, by Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 21-46. On racial histories of multi-story buildings, see Adrienne Brown, The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2017); James E. West, A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2022); and Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Post-war New York (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010).
See Ray Lifchez and Barbara Winslow, Design for Independent Living: The Environment and Physically Disabled People (Winslow Design Library, 1979); Michael Daniels, Ramps are Beautiful (Berkeley: Center for Independent Living, 1982); and Ignacio G. Galán, “Unlearning Ableism: Design Knowledge, Contested Models, and the Experience of Disability in 1970s Berkeley,” Journal of Design History 36, no. 1 (2023): 73-92. On the experiments at Urbana-Champaign, see Bess Williamson, Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design (New York: NYU Press, 2019); and Hamraie, Building Access. On the University of Connecticut experiments, see Barbara Penner, “The Flexible Heart of the Home,” Places Journal, 2018.
Information on Ohlone Park and Greg Brown Park comes from the Berkeley Historical Society. On the coastal commission, see Todd Holmes, “Tides of Tension: A Historical Look At Staff-Commissioner Relations In the California Coastal Commission,” Bill Lane Center for the American West, Stanford University, ➝; and Thomas J. Osborne, “Saving the Golden Shore: Peter Douglas and the California Coastal Commission, 1972–2011,” Southern California Quarterly 96, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 433-464. Bess Williamson also notes the proximity of the People’s Park activism and disabled activism in Berkeley, in Williamson, Accessible America.
This is a feature of the scholarship of Aimi Hamraie and Bess Williamson, see Hamraie, Building Access; and Williamson, Accessible America.
See the 1992 US Government report, “Wilderness accessibility for people with disabilities…,” National Council on Disability, December 1, 1992, ➝.
For more on this tension, see the chapter “Of a Weaker Nature: Wilderness, Urban Landscapes, and Biocapacity” in David Gissen, The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities and Landscapes Beyond Access (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023), 25-44.
For more on tensions between access, disability rights, and indigenous rights, see Jess L. Cowing, “Occupied land is an access issue: Interventions in feminist disability studies and narratives of Indigenous activism,” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 17, no. 17 (2020): 9-25.
The idea of “disabled communalism” was developed in the context of Barry Bergdoll and Juliana Barton’s exhibition “Reset: Towards a New Commons,” at the Center for Architecture in New York City. See Irene Cheng, David Gissen, Brett Snyder, et al., Block Party: From Independent Living to Disabled Communalism, ➝. Mia Mingus developed the concept of “access intimacy” in the statement “Access Intimacy, Interdependence and Disability Justice,” ➝.
Berkeley was the first city in the United States to implement single-family zoning. See Marc Weiss, “Urban Land Developers and the Origins of Zoning Laws: The Case of Berkeley,” Berkeley Planning Journal 3, no. 1 (1986): 7-25.
Examples of these latter practices include the creation of Ohlone Park in North Berkeley in the 1970s, the 2021 vote at the Berkeley City Council to end single family zoning, and the work of organizations like the East Bay Permanent Housing Cooperative (East Bay “PREC”).
On Ridgewood, see Allie Griffin, “Ridgewood Civic Group Protests 17-Story Luxury Tower Outside Developer’s Home Early Sunday,” Ridgewood Post, September 16, 2020; and Angelica Acevedo, “Ridgewood Tenants Union rallies against planned luxury apartment tower,” QNS.com, October 15, 2019.
In the nineteenth century, representations of “squatters” emphasized their frailty (see George Caleb Bingham’s The Squatters, 1850). In the postwar era the squatter took on far more athletic qualities in literature, film, and photographic representations. This was inspired by Situationist writing that also emphasized the transgressive act of trespass. In terms of “curb smashing,” there is one known event, in Denver in 1978, and several urban legends of this happening in Ann Arbor and Berkeley in the late 1970s.
Positions is an independent initiative of e-flux Architecture.
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