Terashima leads a research laboratory at Dalhousie'e School of Planning named "Planning for Equity, Accessibility, and Community Health (PEACH) Research Unit. She investigates methods that measure how built and social environments create inequalities in health and well-being. At the PEACH Research Unit, she looks into people's physical accessibility to various services and amenities, such as food outlets and primary care—and, everything else needed to maintain health and well-being.
That coincides well with CASE researcher Oskar Jonsson's area of interest. In the fall, he will go on a several-month research tour across North America, to learn more from Terashima's research and share CASE's experiences from Sweden.
- The collaboration started in 2021 when I heard about the CASE-developed analysis instrument "Housing Enabler" at a conference in Finland, says Terashima.
What within your research has had the most impact in society?
- We often conduct research that engages persons with lived expertise related to the built environmental factors that reduce or enhance their quality of living. Their voices are one of the least 'heard' among equity-deserving groups in planning processes. We hope we are showcasing their valuable knowledge in a way that helps 'level the playing field' where technical expertise of planners and lived expertise are considered equally important in accessibility and community planning works.
What are your challenges, to really create change?
- We are a small research lab. It is difficult to conduct large scale projects that engage a substantial number of participants with lived expertise due to time and resource constraints. At the same time, it is hard to recruit many participants—especially those with non-visible disability because of persisting stigma. It takes time to create a culture that leaders with lived expertise of accessibility emerge and feel confident in partnering with academic researchers. In our experience, existing leaders are always super knowledgeable and generous in their willingness to educate university researchers. I hope that partnerships in research with these leaders with lived expertise of accessibility becomes a norm sometime.
What is the most important to consider when you reach out?
- Respect, perhaps? We are always blown away by how much knowledge they have around accessible design and policy—without which we will keep creating poorly designed cities. We planners have so much to learn, and we have to approach our work from the respectful place.
Constantly new accessibility issues
Research engineer Nick Christie from the USA, who works in the research group Active and Healthy Ageing in Lund, is surprised at the many public places not accessible in Sweden and in Europe, compared to in his home country where this is more strictly regulated.
In Canada, the so-called 15-minutes neighborhoods are drawing much attention, where basic services can be reached within a quarter of an hour's walk. An average adult walks 1.25 meters per second (according to Google Maps or Walk Score), so if your walking speed is slower that—e.g., if you are an older person, a child, a person with mobility challenges—your 15-minutes neighborhood is much smaller.
- “Most people are not average people,” says, Terashima, “so the neighborhoods that are generally considered walkable based on the average adult-based measure may not be walkable at all for a lot of people.
“Questions of accessible or inclusive design also evolve all the time,” she says, using public toilets as an example. North American cities are increasingly installing ‘all-gender’ public toilets, responding to the issue of safety for non-binary users. Such an issue was not on the radar of planners a decade or so ago. Now, many municipalities are starting to be required to install accessible public toilets. But accessible for whom? Terashima recounts her recent visit in Tokyo where a university public toilet was equipped with many features like voice activated flashing toilet, touchless door, ostomate-compatible sink, and adult changing table. Terashima learned that they were having a bit of ‘problem’ because of the nice adult changing table—students sleep and eat lunch in the toilet. A new question arises, should the students be allowed to sleep and eat in the toilet? Again, whose access issues are we trying to address?
Terashima introduced several other research activities at PEACH, including testing of signage accessibility, visualization of accessibility standards specifications, and 3D modeling of streets and public spaces based on the advice of persons with lived expertise. Their community-based projects include Nova Ramp Up, a project in collaboration with a local support organization for formerly incarcerated people to create custom wooden ramps for small stores in rural towns, Cheers to Access to offer restaurants and coffee shops ‘certificate stickers’ to put up in their store front if they have accessible features such as toilets with grab bars, different height tables, and wide and level hallways. PEACH also developed a digital map app, where the public can report obstacles, potholes and other accessibility data.
This CASE Scientific Session in Lund will hopefully open up more and deeper conversations and some collaboration between the researchers in PEACH and CASE going forward.
