Repositioning sociocultural safety and security in shaping disabled-friendly urban spaces

Abstract

Sociocultural aspects are very critical in the daily life activities of people, including for the disabled, as their mobility limitation quite often cause a handicap for dependency. Disabled-friendly environment design becomes essential for their daily needs of behaviour and activities. This paper aims to investigate how sociocultural aspects guarantee the disabled's safety and security in urban public spaces in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. It searches the conceptual framework of how do the disabled consume the urban public areas, and whether the ICT (Information Communication and Technology) sufficiently support a better solution for the environment. The methods for collecting data used behaviour setting, observation of the physical environment, interviews with interrelated actors in disabled-friendly design to test the results. The preliminary findings show that the use of ICT that psychologically represents the power of techno-socio-cultural network among society is a significant matter to support the solution.