How cities disable people who move differently
By Louise Kinross
Ron Buliung studies the ways that cities shut out people who walk differently or wheel to get around. "My research is a political act as much as an academic venture," says Ron, who is a professor of disability studies and transportation geography at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Ron is also the chair of U of T's tri-campus graduate programs in geography and planning. Ron's daughter Asha, 10, uses a power wheelchair to move around. "What motivates me is my lived experience observing a lack of justice in the everyday lives of disabled people," Ron says. We spoke to Ron five years ago in this BLOOM piece, and decided to catch up on his latest research.
BLOOM: You talk about ways that the city can disabled people. What are some examples?
Ron Buliung: There are problems in our built environment, things like inaccessible threshholds to any building, be it a retail place or institution, or elevators breaking down in the TTC, or no elevators in some stations. If you think about our education system, the ways in which not all schools are universally accessible. We have a subset of schools in the Toronto District School Board that accommodate what the Ministry of Education calls 'exceptionalities,' which are identified as a clinical diagnosis, when the thing that's disabling is that the schools don't work for every body.
BLOOM: I guess the word exceptionality locates the problem in the child.
Ron Buliung: Yes, it's a biomedical, medicalized approach to thinking about disability. It comes back to who the people in institutions are thinking about when they design their systems: students with disabilities are the afterthought. With Covid, we took for granted that the TDSB would have some kind of plan to ensure that children with individualized education plans (IEPs) were factored in to the way they set up classrooms online, but that wasn't the case at all. They had no plan. My daughter was placed in a class that had children from junior kindergarten to Grade 8.
BLOOM: Were they all special-education students?
Ron Buliung: Yes, they basically got as far as setting up what I would call a virtual intensive support program space, but not the second stage, where the students would go to their grade appropriate classroom spaces. It took about six weeks of advocating to get her sorted into an integrated class that made sense.
We've done a lot of work in the last few years looking at the ways transportation to and from school can paradoxically function as an enabling force and a barrier. We found children were sometimes spending much more time on buses than their peers, and so you have situations where kids are missing peer contact time and in some cases classroom time.
BLOOM: Yes, the day often ends for special-needs students at 2:30.
Ron Buliung: That's right. These kids will be pulled from class early to get ready for the bus. In one of our studies we figured it was something like 40 hours of missed time over the course of the school year. If the broader population of students was missing 40 hours because of busing, you can imagine the outrage among parents.
The other thing I wonder about is that these buses run at less than full capacity. You've got segregated transport for disabled students and unused bus capacity. Why couldn't there be a more creative way of doing busing that brings disabled and non-disabled students together?
BLOOM: Your recent study on food access for disabled Toronto adults was disturbing. We hear a lot about food insecurity in the media, but not its impact on people with disabilities.
Ron Buliung: People with disabilities are almost entirely absent in the scholarly literature and public discourse about food insecurity, and that's what's driving this work. My former student, Dr. Naomi Schwartz, who is the primary author on this study, was interested in food insecurity, so we worked to bring the concepts of disability and food insecurity together.
When people talk about correcting food deserts in cities, they make the assumption that people can move around in typical ways, and I find that troubling. We already know disabled workers are paid less and have more precarious employment, and that disabled students are less likely to achieve their desired level of educational attainment.
If you're already facing barriers that could limit your income, and we know income is protective from food insecurity, then the likelihood of a disabled person experiencing it is probably much higher. In one study, controlling for other factors, people with physical disabilities were four times more likely than others in Canada to experience food insecurity, which is astounding, but sadly unsurprising.
BLOOM: You followed people who use mobility devices to see the barriers they face shopping in real-time. What did you learn?
Ron Buliung: It's one thing to be able to access a food destination, a restaurant or green grocer or grocery store, but it's another thing entirely to have sufficient income to acquire food that you want or need, and to be able to functionally use the facility given the way it's laid out. There's one image in the article of one of our participants completely jammed in an aisle because it's so narrow. Other barriers are the elevation of the products. So a person can't reach the top of a shelf and has to go and find someone to help them. There are barriers to waiting for Wheel-Trans. One participant talks about balancing the number of items they're going to purchase against getting out of the store in time to meet the bus.
BLOOM: Because they will only wait for five minutes.
Ron Buliung: Yes. So you might not be able to finish your shopping, or there may be delays in the check-out process, and that can create all kinds of stress and anxiety.
It reminds me of when Asha was in nursery school and I would become incredibly stressed about where I was going to park because when I got there, someone would have parked in the disabled parking spot. Then the school gave us some accommodation with spots and people even started parking there. It's a feeling that you're disrupting the norm.
BLOOM: A study participant talks about how a grocery store may have one wider than usual check-out aisle for people with disabilities, but a cashier isn't there. It sends the message that your needs aren't important.
Ron Buliung: Yes, she said she could only go through one aisle in the entire store, and they weren't staffing it. So she'd have to go and find someone and ask if they could come. You never know what you're going to get when you get there, and that creates uncertainty.
BLOOM: It seemed like there were so many variables that conspired against a person being able to get the food they need. Even food banks were found to be physically inaccessible. In one instance a participant said during an ice storm if she didn't have money to order food in, she would just drink a glass of water and not eat till the next day.
Ron Buliung: If you were to take the experience of a so-called non-disabled shopper on a regular trip and unpack that, you could probably find a barrier in each movement or action for a person with a disability. One of the things we wanted to do was to look at what was happening inside the person's home as well.
BLOOM: Yes, there was one example where the apartment was so tiny that the person couldn't use a mobility device, and had to move around by hanging onto the wall. So all of these things could impact a person's ability to prepare food, and even their safety while making it. One thing that struck me was how people who rely on ODSP can't afford quality food.
Ron Buliung: Income is a big issue. ODSP is not keeping pace with the cost of living. This is not a revelation for people with disabilities, but we're writing this more for the non-disabled audience. We need to figure out how we can increase ODSP income. It's not just about having access to the store, but what can I afford inside the store?
BLOOM: And purchasing a monthly Wheel-Trans pass to be able to get to a store ate a huge chunk out of monthly income. Did anything surprise you about the findings?
Ron Buliung: No, I expected to see these results. But we wanted to give a voice to people who are otherwise being excluded from scholarship on food insecurity. We wanted to get these stories into the literature and into the public realm, that's why all of the work was published on open access.
BLOOM: What is most challenging about your research?
Ron Buliung: It's not about producing the research, which we have a handle on. It's about my overwhelming sense of frustration with what we find. We have all kinds of legislated rights and human rights, but they don't always translate into just experiences for people. I want to shine a light on the spaces, however large or small, where there is a clear lack of justice in the experience of disabled people.
BLOOM: Can you give us a brief update on Asha?
Ron Buliung: Asha is 10 and going into Grade 5. She's a highly social, brilliant kid who's very creative. She's into singing and digital art.
Professor Buliung will be the Mickey Milner International Professorship keynote lecturer at the upcoming Bloorview Research Institute Symposium on Nov. 15. Here are links to other studies he co-authored recently: More than just a bus trip: School busing, disability and access to education in Toronto; Experiences of parking at school for families living with childhood disability.
