![use sketchup 17 to draw wheel chair ramp 2d use sketchup 17 to draw wheel chair ramp 2d](https://cad-block.com/uploads/posts/2016-10/1476108960_disabled_people.jpg)
These efforts were even more poignant in light of an incident that happened a few days earlier, when the Nigerian Twitterscape exploded with images from the House of Representatives in Abuja, showing a paraplegic man, entering the legislative chambers and forced to crawl on all fours to descend numerous flights of stairs as lawmakers watched indifferently. Although Steve made light of the situation, the ignominy wasn’t lost on me, a designer practicing in Abuja who has long acknowledged the urgent need for better access for the disabled. The street was fraught with obstacles and Steve had to disembark from his wheelchair on several occasions for it to be lifted over the barricades, a heart-wrenching sight for everyone present. As expected, he had a hard time negotiating most public spaces we went to, and couldn’t get into others because of poor wheelchair accessibility or faulty lifts.Īfter one of the roundtable sessions at the Norwegian Embassy, we set out for the short walk to the residence of the Swedish Ambassador for a final soiree. The workshop curator, Steve Marr, a political science PhD and senior lecturer at the University of Malmo in Sweden, often needed a wheelchair to get around, and our time together offered me an opportunity to view the city through his eyes. It’s an issue that formed the basis for my 2016 entry for the Richard Rogers Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), where I had proposed to use the fellowship to develop a prescriptive accessible design blueprint for public spaces in the city of Abuja.Ĭonsidering the events that also took place that same week, Makuwira’s talk couldn’t have been more timely. The lecture reaffirmed my sentiments on the gross inadequacies of urban public spaces for the disabled. Recently I spent part of a week in the company of a multidisciplinary group of academics and researchers from Europe, the US, and Africa, at a workshop entitled “The Practice and Politics of DIY Urbanism in Africa.” Jonathan Makuwira, a professor from the Malawi University of Technology, delivered a compelling paper on “Disability and Urbanism in Malawi,” highlighting the many challenges of the continent’s disabled population, using that city as a case study. This article was originally published by Common Edge as “ Africa’s Undeclared War on the Disabled.”
![use sketchup 17 to draw wheel chair ramp 2d use sketchup 17 to draw wheel chair ramp 2d](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/qc1Irnd6ft4/maxresdefault.jpg)
A paraplegic man, entering the Nigerian House of Representatives, is forced to crawl down the steps.