Chloe Johnson looks at how accessible the capital is for people with disabilities…
Accessibility is a broad term often used to define a very specific concept. Wheelchair accessibility is the main idea that often springs to mind, but there are a variety of different ways we can be accessible to disabled people: alongside physical access, there is also intellectual, psychological, financial and other aspects related to disability culture that we sometimes fail to consider.
It’s important to measure how accessible a location is to normalise having access needs that impact daily life; we all have access needs but the way they are catered for differs in terms of what is deemed essential or otherwise. When disabled people’s access needs are viewed as non-essential, it can impact the ability to travel and explore the world, creating anxiety and barriers instead of a fun, stress-free experience.
So where does a city like Berlin—a destination famed for its cultural capital as well as its progressive and open-minded nature—sit on the accessibility scale? Public transport accessibility has been on the city’s political agenda since before reunification, when disabled activists from West Berlin banded together in 1987, reacting to budget cuts and asserting their mobility rights by interrupting infrastructures, blocking the flow of bus traffic and numerous other protests. This overlapped with movements within academia and political culture in terms of shifting towards the social model of disability.
This social model states that disabled individuals have barriers to access and inclusion, as opposed to their disability needing to be fixed; in other words it is society that must be more committed to inclusion instead. The Senate Department for Urban Development began a working group in 2001 called “Building and Transport – barrier-free” and in 2007 published “Barrier-free Planning and Building in Berlin – Publicly Accessible Buildings”—the debut handbook for planning private and public building access.
This was updated into the Design For All scheme in 2012, and in 2013, the capital was named a barrier-free city by the EU Commission—beating 99 other cities—and was particularly commended on its public transport and new barrier-free buildings. In the last decade or so, Berlin has continued to pursue a policy of accessibility, partly because of population ageing, which means the proportion of people with disabilities is expected to rise throughout Germany.
The more recent 2018 Mobility Act put together actions that aimed to make “the people of Berlin will be able to move around the city more safely, in greater comfort, with greater reliability and without barriers”. This resulted in Berlin introducing a “pedestrian law” which elevates the status of pedestrians, which in turn gives more rights and say for disabled people.
In addition to these broader city planning initiatives there are also some decent resources available on the Visit Berlin website, such as a dedicated page for wheelchair users and