Decision Support Tools and Policy Initiatives in Support of Universal Design in Buildings - The POLIS Project

Nikos Sakkas, Dr. Eng., POLIS Coordinator, BPM SA & Apintech Ltd, Greece

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Introduction

POLIS is a EU research project, co-funded by the 6th framework for R&D and running in the three-year period from 2003 till end of 2005.

Figure 1: The POLIS Logo

POLIS departs from the view that accessibility and universal design are predominantly an important social issue; insofar they aim at improving the status of disabled people and equalizing their opportunities in society. However, next to this very important social dimension, a significant competitiveness and business impact can also be claimed, as the link between accessibility and increased productivity can often be demonstrated. Especially in less developed areas, where inaccessible environments are, typically, more commonplace, we are staunch in our belief that significant development opportunities exist, by capitalizing upon the concept of accessible environments. Let us think for a moment about the tourism industry. Is it really aware that by not adapting its, very often, inaccessible infrastructures it literally turns its back to approximately the 15- 20% of the global market share?

Technically POLIS seeks:

1. To provide for a detailed analysis of the economics, i.e., costs and benefits associated with accessibility and to use this information to develop a decision support system, called hereafter a Decision Support System for Universal Building Design (DSS.UBD), aiming at the well- founded evaluation of various building design scenarios, with the long run goal to increase the cost efficient uptake of Universal Design by society and to provide for a significant enhancement of the quality of life of people with special needs (disabled, ageing, children, etc.)



2. To address the relevance of the proposed solutions within the existing EU/ member states' policy instruments and to suggest practical means of integration within existing or, very likely, newly required policy instruments, towards the ultimate goal of an "accessibility for all" EU standard. Also, to investigate the means and modalities by which such a specification can lead to the development of a EU wide certification scheme- label, with regard to building universal design.



3. To disseminate the results to diverse audiences and to identify business opportunities in terms of new-era assistive technologies and services.

In this perspective, it is very encouraging that POLIS objectives have already been reflected in recent European policy documents, such as the Communication from the Commission to the Council, The EU Parliament, The European Economic and Social Committee of the Regions "Equal opportunities for people with disabilities: A European Action Plan."

"Under the framework of the 6th Community Research Programme, the Commission will initiate a study aimed at producing a detailed decision-support tool for use in the evaluation of building design, on the universal design, or 'design-for-all' principle, which will take account of the needs of people with disabilities in the built environment, notably as regards the work-place"

The Precursor of POLIS - The PUB+ Project

It is interesting to note that POLIS was conceptualized during work carried out in the less developed parts of Europe. In the period 2002- 2003 a project (Public Utility Building accessibility, PUB+, http://www.teicrete.gr/lei/pub+/) was carried out in some less developed countries of the EU (Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Czech Republic, Greece) with the purpose to highlight and prioritize the key issues related to accessibility of the building domain in such countries. The project carried out extensive field surveys as well as interviews with decision makers and representatives of the disabled communities. A number of recommendations resulted, as a common position of this project.

During this research it was clear that disabled citizens still face serious problems an eventually discrimination when seeking to move in buildings, or in the broader urban area. The point was not to lament an obviously bad situation but to address some key aspects that are acting as barriers towards a more accessible society. It was very important to note that these barriers may be only some kind of a mindset trap, and their removal may not be very demanding financially. In this sense they represent promising lines of action.

In this framework we identified two key issues, two common malpractices.

• First, accessibility is not primarily about elements (doors, elevators, etc.) but about accessible routes . What is important to note is that these routes are very often under the control of different administrations. For a disabled person to enter a bus, the pavement in under control of the local authority, the road under control of the Ministry of Public Works and the bus under control of the Ministry of Transport. It is totally impossible to have these three authorities set a common agenda on making the route accessible. A separate top level unit should be perhaps set up in a Ministry to assume joint responsibility and exercise authority on all aspects of accessibility.



• Second, very often there is a widespread opinion, even among top government officials, according to which the only problem is the law enforcement issue. This is totally wrong however and it represents a mentality that may disregard the important inefficiencies in other issues. The incorporation of accessibility enabling clauses in laws is often not appropriate and the technical understanding and representation of accessibility in technical recommendations, is also not completely adequate. In a recent meeting with the president of the mobility impaired in Greece he vehemently raised the idea that the real laws (ministerial decrees, etc. and not the recommendation instruments like circulars, etc.) offer a very rough and simplistic view on accessibility. If the law instrument is inadequate, we should not expect a lot from its enforcement, even if this is completely successful.

Besides these two key remarks, the following conclusions have also been reached.

1. A clear line between what, from the corpus of the technical specifications, is absolutely required, what is recommended and what perhaps should simply just be looked into.
2. An integrated approach, clearly introducing the concept of an "accessible route," in addition to accessible elements and spaces, and defining specifications for this "route" as well as the concept of a "protruding object" in order not to compromise the accessibility of any given route.
3. A differentiation of specs with regard to whether they relate to construction of a new building or alteration of an old one as well as with regard to the possible historical and artistic value of the building.
4. The enhancement of the level of detail of the specifications, by providing for a segmentation of the mobility impaired population and the production of standards that reflect needs of such particular segments (e.g. children).
5. A use of global best practice towards building a long-term strategy on building accessibility.
6. A comprehensive design, drawing and dimensioning of the specifications, can provide for their enhanced and unambiguous assimilation.
7. Also, a number of technical support tools could help the good dissemination of the specifications to all interested audiences. Such tools could comprise
   • Development of practical decision support tools that could help analyze the various interventions, primarily to existing, but also new buildings, in terms of cost and accessibility.
   • Implementation checklists or even better on line help tools for a fast assimilation of the specifications. These checklists should perhaps be structured with due consideration to the particular type of the building (museum, ministry, restaurant, etc.) so that they may provide for the required focus.
   • Multimedia productions for a rich experience in presenting the technical specifications.

Thus, POLIS resulted as a follow up action of the PUB project and it responds completely to the priorities identified in this latter project.

Once again, we stress that, not only the social but also the economic potential of accessible environments is often higher in less developed areas of the world! Just as, very often, growth potentials are greater in such areas.

Metrics for Building Accessibility and the BAM Methodology

In order to make possible an analytical approach to building accessibility POLIS established a theoretical background, i.e., a methodology we have labeled as Building Accessibility Metrics (BAM).

This approach builds upon the related state of the art, and is currently in publication process in international magazines. Here we wish to simply present the basic ideas behind the BAM methodological approach.

In the BAM approach we propose to view a building as a provider of services to citizens. So, it is rather the accessibility to the building services that is of interest. This links us conceptually much more directly to the underlying non-discrimination quest. Services must be made equally accessible to citizens.

What are however the building services? Depending on the nature of the building (administration, entertainment, etc,) we see it would be useful to distinguish between the core service (or core services in some cases) and the auxiliary services. If the building is a supermarket, then shopping is the primary (core) service. However, supplementary (auxiliary) services, such as supervised children playgrounds, telephone kiosks, etc. may also be on offer. Labeling a service as auxiliary does not necessarily render it inferior, in terms of importance. For example, emergency and evacuation services are always auxiliary according to our terminology, yet very much high in regard to their importance. Accessibility must therefore relate to both, the core but also to the auxiliary services offered by the building.

The following figure summarizes the above discussion. Our example building has two entrance service points (e1 and e2) and offers a number of core service points (c1, c2, c3) as well as auxiliary service points (a1, a2, a3). Out of all possible combinations, three, overall, paths have been selected as typical for the accessibility of this building: Of course, a good awareness of the building functionality is required for this selection. Let us assume that in our case these critical paths are:

• The two routes from the back entrance e1 to core service locations c1.
• The routes (dotted lines) from core service c1 to auxiliary service a1 and to auxiliary service a2 (e.g. toilet access)
• The route between the core service locations c1 (e.g., for the case there is frequent employee mobility between these two building sections)

In this case, we have considered that service accessibility from the front right entrance route e2 would add nothing significant to our overall assessment. The same assumption goes for core service locations c2 and c3 as well auxiliary service a3.

Figure 2: Selecting representative paths between building
service points for assessing accessibility.

The above discussion details in essence the internal accessibility of a building. Citizens do not however appear all that comfortable at building entrance points. In many cases this may be a very tedious task. Isolating the building from the surrounding urban space may often lead to gross errors in assessing the only meaningful issue: building service accessibility.

It is well known and stressed in many technical manuals and policy documents that it is accessible paths that really matter and not distinct elements (doors, elevators, etc.). Therefore, the paths to the building entrances must be well looked into as they define a very great deal of the overall accessibility.

It is therefore absolutely necessary to integrate in the discussion the concept of the accessibility of the surrounding urban space. But how to really deal with this? Obviously paths initiate from citizen homes. Typically, they include elements of their own homes as well as the transport system. Somehow we must draw a line, otherwise we risk ending up considering a supermarket as an inaccessible place just because some disabled citizen's house, a long way away, has a poorly designed ramp. Along the same line of thought, building managers, whatever they may be, cannot be possibly held responsible for the accessibility features of the transport system.

It may already be apparent that responsibility is a key word for defining the scope of our discussion. Building administrations normally have the responsibility and also the interest to secure accessible pathways to their buildings. These pathways should be looked into as directly affecting overall building accessibility.

How can these pathways be transposed into the location typology, so that we may then be again able to draw upon the work reviewed in the previous chapter? In other words, what can be a set of typical outdoor locations that could be considered as representative of the accessibility of the surrounding area?

We argue that there are three types of such points. The first, relates to a typical, just outdoor, location. This could model elements such as pavement status, entrance accessibility, etc. and could represent a general building ambience accessibility, i.e., the "just outside" status of accessibility. A second typical location would represent parking spaces, under control of the buildings. Pathways from parking spaces into the building are critical to overall accessibility. Finally, all the pathways from all nearby public transport stations should also be considered as a third type of locations necessary to model the accessibility of the surrounding space. Of course, this may not be under the direct control of the building manager. In most cases however it will be under his indirect control. He will have some scope for intervention towards the transport authorities to request better access to public transport stations. There are many discussions going on as to the need to co-ordinate policies (transport and accessibility in our example). We argue that society is becoming more and more responsive to such issues. In many cases bad accessibility to the public transport system will be due to negligence of the building managers rather than an unresponsive society. We would therefore like to consider access to such locations clearly within the scope of building accessibility and the jurisdiction of building managers.

In summary, the accessibility of the surrounding urban space must be taken fully into account in order to assess overall building performance in terms of accessibility. We propose that this external space be modeled by means of three distinct types of locations:

• Location(s) typical of the nearby outdoor environment
• Location(s) at car parking spaces
• Location(s) at the nearest stations of the public transport system

This discussion for outdoor or urban accessibility is summarized in the following figure, where the three location classes for out-door accessibility are represented by (u1), (u2) and (u3) respectively. In the case of public transportation two routes were considered necessary for inclusion in the analysis; the closest metro (u31e1) and bus (u32e1) stations. For private access, the building parking space was included (the nearest taxi station could have been another case to be looked into alternatively or complementarily).

Figure 3: The three critical urban space location classes
(u1 = walking; u2 = private transportation means;
u3 = public transportation means).

Decision Support Systems for Building Accessibility

The above analysis provides a conceptual framework for dealing with and evaluating building accessibility in a structured and detailed way. We see this work as a theoretical foundation of an ambitious development, the design and implementation of a decision support system (DSS), capable not only of performing analyses of building accessibility but also being able to provide suggestions as to specific interventions that could be undertaken in order to drastically enhance it.

In this work we aim to go in great detail in analyzing the economics, i.e., costs but also benefits associated with accessibility, and to subsequently use this information to develop what we call a Decision Support System for Universal Building Design (DSS.UBD), aiming at the well-founded accessibility evaluation of various building design scenarios. It is important to note that accessibility interventions in this work are not considered simply as architectural interventions to the various building elements but also as means to enhance its functionality (functional accessibility) by means primarily of ICT solutions. In other words, we see the emergence of the intelligent building and the smart home as very much related to building accessibility and we will seek to fully assess their potential to provide for cost-effective alternate solutions in Building Universal Design.

The envisaged DSS.UBD environment will be based on some, perhaps, adaptation of the theoretic framework presented in this paper. It would however require a lot of additional analytical data or experience based rules in order to be able to provide guidelines for accessibility interventions, whose costs and benefits would be clear and well founded. This would be the ultimate goal.

Such approaches are closely connected to recent policy developments as encompassed in a report carried out by a group of experts for the European Commission ("A Europe accessible for All," December 2003). In this document it is stressed that "accessibility should be seen as an investment in infrastructure, leading to increased production and higher productivity." Perhaps it is high time we started moving beyond a short sighted approach with regard to accessibility and start measuring the benefits but also the costs associated with maybe different levels of accessibility (as modeled by the relative accessibility metrics proposed in the previous sections).

At the end, it will never of course be possible to completely do away experience based and subjective assessments of the many aspects of accessibility. Yet, analytical approaches and tools, used in a complementary way, may provide significant decision maker assistance and time economization.

Conclusions

Building and urban space accessibility can largely benefit from a paradigm created from the area of Environment. At first, the dominant approach for the protection of the environment was an "end of pipe" approach. Solutions, at some notable cost, were deployed to help us get rid of the problems associated with the emission of pollutants in water, ground or air. It took some time to realize that pollution abatement was a naïve approach and that along a more integrated view of things, based on resource productivity and waste minimization principles, even financial benefits could result to replace the otherwise costs.

Similarly, in accessibility, a more integrated approach is required. This integration must realize that accessible buildings and urban areas are to the benefit of the vast majority of people, when considered in a life cycle approach and not as moments in time. Thus, universal building design can be an approach that can pay well off even in monetary terms. In POLIS we are now trying to delve in the cost / benefit related aspects of accessibility to help support this strategic assumption. The BAM methodology, briefly summarized above, is the theoretical ground-stone for any such analysis.

Of course, we must never loose from sight the social aspect of accessibility. Inclusion must remain a dominant, a distinguishing element of our culture. However, this should not keep us away from highlighting the economic aspects and for seeking opportunities for business, which, especially in less developed areas, where the concept is still in its infancy, may be eventually significant.

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