- Building Partnerships for the Integration of Disabled to the City: Creating accessible Spaces in Çankaya, Ankara    186 kb by    Varol, Cigdem & Gurer, Nilufer & Ercoskun, Ozge | cvarol@gazi.edu.tr    Short Outline This study includes the following three sections: organizing partnership for local governance, creating barrier-free spaces for disabled and a case of a multistakeholder participatory process in Çankaya-Ankara with recommendations. Abstract Focusing on new horizontal partnerships, networking and community involvement in policy formulation and decision-making, cause the transition of traditional urban government towards urban governance. The vertical integration of activities at different levels of government contributes to the improvement of quality of life in cities and provides a better management of urban environments. This paper addresses to participatory actions of Çankaya Municipality which is one of the biggest district municipalities in Ankara. The municipality has strong views about a sustainable future of its district and tries to realize urban planning and design principles due to participatory planning aims. One of the projects of Çankaya Municipality including residents, community groups, universities, and other associations in Ankara is reorganizing the public spaces for the physically disabled people. It appears as a new approach in geographical understanding of disablement as the physical construction of urban space often produces distinctive spatialities of exclusion for disabled people. Çankaya’s local councils are working with universities and NGO’s to reach this goal. Within the project some streets have been redesigned collaboratively and expansion of this project to the other urban spaces has been discussed among many local organizations. Such participatory actions of redesigning public areas for increasing accessibility and mobility, raising the awareness of citizens and creating common platforms with many local organizations are new and bright subjects for Ankara that can lead to other districts and cities to develop a vision for sustainable solutions. In this study, the decisions made by the meetings of local councils are analyzed and the results of the project are explored by some visual materials and by the interviews made with the mayor, associations, academicians, citizens and disabled people. In addition, the results of some critical views, comparisons and positive and negative effects of partnerships on urban planning and design are discussed considering disabled priority. Keywords urban governance, participatory planning, partnerships, urban design for disabled, Çankaya Municipality, Ankara Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2006: Cities between Integration and Disintegration   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper