2INACCESSIBLE ACCESSIBILITYRamps in Global Friction
In the fall of 2012, not long after arriving in Petrozavodsk, I befriended a journalist.1 He was about my age—late twenties at the time—and a distinctive personality around the small city for both his dark red hair (an unusual color) and his gleeful enthusiasm for investigative human-interest journalism and the trappings of a vibrant public sphere he imagined it might offer. This was a political moment at the start of Putin's reconsolidation of power, when the Russian foreign agent laws had just come into place and were squeezing the myriad local nonprofits that had professionalized in the first two decades of the post-Soviet period, returning civic life to the provenance of state organs proper. Although some so-called foreign political discourses, especially feminism and LGBTQ rights (e.g., the Pussy Riot affair), were under fire in Russian public discourse that fall, I observed that disability access did not seem to attract the same degree of controversy (see Borodina 2021). Despite moments of political crackdown, the journalist, unlike many other young people I met in the city, was still optimistic, and although we did not meet often, he sometimes invited me to interesting public events (such as an event series in which another young journalist interviewed public figures). I sometimes wrote him direct messages on social media or via text to inquire about the general popular opinion held on an issue.
I had come to know of the journalist through one of his investigative pieces, when a friend sent me a link. The link led me to a video investigation produced by the journalist and his colleague, a news camera operator. In the video, they follow a tip from local disability advocates that the provincial theater building in the city center, a historical building that had recently been renovated, was still exceedingly difficult to navigate. They observed how difficult it was to get to the theater in a wheelchair using public transportation. When I met the journalist for coffee, he explained that he was aiming for a web 2.0 style of entertainment news. Rather than produce another story simply interviewing disabled citizens (other journalists had produced several such pieces over the past few years following a lawsuit related to inclusive education), the journalist decided to obtain a wheelchair and try to access the theater himself.
In the clip, he sat in a borrowed wheelchair and attempted to get from a small vehicle parked nearby, up the curb, up the front entrance ramp, and into the theater. The piece is problematic from the perspective of disability studies in that the journalist possessed none of the lived experience, arm strength, and expertise that comes from navigating in a wheelchair regularly. Thus, his repeated failures to navigate barriers in the built environment came as no surprise. Charming as he was, the piece still managed to be entertaining, and, at the end of the clip, he moved on from the theater to try to gain entry to a city bus. In this clip, the ableist barriers of the transit system are more apparent, as one bus driver simply drove off when he asked for help getting on board, and then another is shown struggling to help him through the door.
When I interviewed the journalist, he admitted that he knew very little about disability issues in the city. He had decided to make the clip because he thought it would produce good content and because the issue of barriers was a good example of a bigger problem—that is, the lack of follow-through on the part of the city, provincial, and federal government. These agencies claimed to be attending to disability access issues (not only by renovating the theater but also by ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities), but they obviously did so without concern for the end result in terms of convenience and usability for actual citizens. At the time, and later as I started writing what would become this book, I was puzzled by this interview. I couldn’t quite fit it into the story I had imagined that I wanted to tell. How could I write an ethnography of disability advocacy that completely left out disabled people? What could I make of the way that the journalist mobilized barriers to disability access in the built environment as a sort of metaphor or vehicle to make a larger point? Later, as I developed this book, I understood that the journalist's video was one example of the second type of inaccess story that I kept stumbling on in Russian public discourse—that is, inaccess stories that use disability access as a metaphor for the broader failures of the state to make good on the promises of public infrastructure to deliver a degree of ease and convenience for every day (nondisabled) people.
The journalist's reportage made me curious to ask disabled people in the city about their experiences of inaccess in the built environment. As I started to collect stories, many of them homed in on the irony of inaccessibility even while accessible design elements were present. The journalist's project also reminded me of the 2010 interview (discussed in the introduction) that I recorded with Nina Anatolievna, a schoolteacher whose daughter, twenty-two at the time of the interview, had cerebral palsy and used a wheelchair. Describing for me the kinds of frustration that she and her daughter had faced over the years, Nina recalled only being able to enter a theater through a service entrance in the back, which she referred to using the memorable phrase chiornyi vkhod, black or dark entrance, before the renovation that the journalist reported on. Subsequently, another parent, Katya, remembered having to run around looking for a janitor to request that the newly renovated accessible washroom be unlocked—it was apparently kept locked because it was understood to be for special occasions—invalidating the ease of use the notion of accessibility implied. Like the ramp at the corner store near Galya's house described in the introduction, Nina's description of the corner store near her apartment was a memorable example of another case in which an accessibility ramp did not actually function to provide access.
In a lot of cases it's just for the check mark (galochka). Is there a ramp?! [mimes checking something off on a list] It's like, this nearby store, where they also built a ramp [sarcastic emphasis].
So Sveta says, “Oh!! They built a ramp!”
And I say, “Sveta, you know, you can go up the ramp but that's it—you’ll stop right there!”
Because she can’t go into the store itself. Because there's—it's only about [shows the width of the door with her hands]. That's it! You get it? She can’t even go through the aisles at all. Oh, there's a ramp—a ramp. So something here is equipped [sarcastic emphasis] (oborudovano).
In this example, Nina sarcastically emphasized the word equipped, stressing the contradiction between the purported intent of access and reality of a retrofitted environment that, while “equipped” with a ramp, was not actually accessible. This observation drew attention to the ways in which elements of the built environment in Russia, recognizably designated as objects intended to provide access, or, disability things, failed to actually facilitate access to public space for people with mobility impairments.2 Nina's commentary fits into broader Russian narratives about the material results of economic and moral corruption in Russian public life, specifically, that the government and wealthy business owners—those performing “official” functions (whom she refers to en masse, as is common in Russian, using the third–person pronoun)—cannot be relied on to carry out their tasks in such a way as to actually benefit the intended recipients (e.g., Rivkin-Fish 2005b, 6–9).
Ramps as symbols of accessible design suggest that a space is designed well. “Good” design communicates a kind of arrival in a desired modernity. Critical studies of design across global contexts suggest that not just designed objects but also the valuation of design thinking as a discursive formation, have become desirable markers of status across global locations. For instance, Lilly Irani argues that objects like sharpie markers and social formations like hackathons, artifacts of Silicon Valley design culture, circulate in India's capital city of Delhi as a modality by which entrepreneurs configure themselves as producers of value and arbiters of India's modern future (Irani 2010, 2019). According to this logic, “design thinking” has a global center, a core of innovation and start-up capital, from which the very concept of design as expertise flows. As Sasha Welland writes, “A well-designed thing structures what is perceived as proper social functioning” (2018). Therefore, the idea of accessible design becomes an object of desire, circulating beyond disability-advocacy communities. An access ramp communicates an idea of access, proffering a symbolic meaning that suggests a certain kind of modernist imaginary is within reach.
After revisiting this interview, I came to think of these inaccessible accessibility ramps as “checkmark ramps,” following Nina's assertion that “it's just for the check mark.” According to Nina, the inaccessible ramps came into being when someone tasked with building a ramp did so merely to fulfill minimum requirements without attending to the ramp's functionality. I wondered: What were the reasons that someone might build such a ramp? What checklist? Who was enforcing it? If these ramps were not working for people with mobility impairments, for whom were they working?
In this chapter, I consider the urban infrastructure of public space in Petrozavodsk as a space in which inaccess stories unfold. I consider also the Russophone internet as an additional sphere in which the meaning of accessible design is forged and travels in friction. I argue that in Russia in 2012, the symbolic function of a ramp was decoupled from the actual function of a ramp—to provide access for wheelchair users and others with mobility impairments. To do so, I consider the “work” that ramps and images of ramps do in the social world. First, I attend to inaccess stories about inaccessible ramps told by my research participants. I observe that in these inaccess stories, the symbolic function of an access ramp as an architectural form may have more to do with performances of professionalism and Europeanness than with a desire for an inclusive public sphere and that the design and construction of ramps plays out through the logic of checklists, a modernist technology that replaces the concern for function of a given form with a list of decontextualized norms. Second, as the concept of “accessible design” circulates globally, the accessibility ramp becomes an object that exists in global friction, taking up different, but interlocking, local meanings. Because we understand the category of disability to be culturally, historically, and spatially and materially contingent, we cannot assume that dostupnost’ as a conceptual category in Russia is reproduced in the same way that barrier-free access is reproduced in Britain (Gleeson 1999; Shakespeare 2006) or that canji mobility is reproduced in China (Kohrman 2005). Observing how disability appears through and with the local material conditions is part of a broader global critical interpretive disability studies.
FIGURE 5. A view of a central bus stop in downtown Petrozavodsk, near the university's main building. A small ramp is visible on the left side of the image, where two stone steps separate a sidewalk from a park walkway. The ramp has a steep slope and no handrails, visually marking it as not “for” disability access; it was probably installed with deliveries to nearby businesses and pedestrians with baby carriages in mind. The park's fountain, partially visible, is aging and modestly maintained and reflects an abstract constructivist style. Photo by Cassandra Hartblay, 2014.
By attending to the friction surrounding disability access in contemporary Russia, I contribute to a rich body of literature in anthropology chronicling the ways in which discourses making claims for social and political inclusion of minority groups, such as feminism, LGBT activism, and so on, take on different meanings and spark different debates in the post-Soviet context (Phillips 2008; Rivkin-Fish 2005a; Hemment 2004; Kay 1999, 2007; Sperling 1999; Essig 1999). By unpacking the ways in which accessibility ramps move as objects or disability things, and accessible design moves as a conceptual category and technology of modernity, I also attends to tensions between universal categories or norms as a strategy for institutionalizing access.
Access in the Russian Built Environment
The Russian built environment is strikingly inaccessible. Russian sociologists working to document the social politics of disability conducted a survey among citizens of the cities of Saratov and surrounding regions in 2004. They found that public roadways and sidewalks were particularly inaccessible, and other public spaces were only slightly better (Romanov and Iarskaia-Smirnova 2006, 109–110). According to their study, although private spaces might be renovated or retrofitted by users, businesses or government offices had made only a few gestures toward accessible design.
Similarly, Human Rights Watch and the Russian disability advocacy nongovernmental organization (NGO) Perspektiva documented the egregious degree to which the so-called social marginalization of people with disabilities is related to material elements of the built environment. International NGOs play important and varied roles in translating international human rights discourses about disability into Russian, in disseminating these ideas to Russian advocates, and in advocating for elements of the international concepts of disability access (such as accessible buses, inclusive public education, and social service programming beyond monthly pensions) to be adopted by the Russian federal government.
In Petrozavodsk, accessibility ramps began to appear in new shopping centers built in the 2000s; shiny mall-like facilities, these new spaces also had large, Western-style elevators, escalators, indoor atriums and food courts. These elements were unusual in the centrally planned, utilitarian logic of Soviet architecture. Most apartment buildings, shops, grocery stores, schools, offices, and public parks had no elements of accessible architecture—most visibly represented by the ramp. Some walkways had outdated ramps designed for delivering freight or pedestrians with baby strollers (e.g., without the railings, slope considerations, and other elements of design that enable disability access). Private citizens and disability NGOs installed makeshift ramps in homes and office spaces. Hospitals lacked even accessible bathrooms, but sometimes they had ramps at a main entrance or had elevators.
The Physics of Friction: The Ramp in Global Motion
To most North American readers the ramp, as an architectural feature, has a particular meaning: it is a “disability thing” (Ott 2014). That is, a ramp as an architectural feature is already linked to the thing that we call “disability.” A ramp abutting an entranceway in a building or near a short flight of stairs is an object that, at a glance, is immediately legible as serving a specific purpose: It facilitates access for people with disabilities. Unlike stairs, a ramp can be navigated by a person in a wheelchair; it can also be a preferable route for people with an unsteady gait, poor balance, or an injured or lesser-functioning leg (stairs require balancing on one leg to lift the other). Although steps assume that people are a certain height, a well-proportioned ramp can make mounting a vertical divide more hospitable for people with short legs. Along with people with a broad range of disabilities, children and elderly people often prefer ramps to stairs; in this sense, it is nondisabled adults who prefer stairs.
This meaning of the ramp has not always been evident. In fact, the ramp as a tool for accessibility in public space emerged as part of the Universal Design (UD) or Accessible Design (AD) movement. Certain elements of UD were incorporated as minimum standards in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. In turn, they became elements of the legal infrastructure of the US building code. Like feminist design theory that preceded it, accessibility by design starts from the premise that “design is never ideologically neutral. Whether explicitly or implicitly, built environments always reference and imagine bodies and spatial inhabitants…. both the presumed body and the marginalized body are always implied in, structurally incorporated into, or actively excluded from, physical environments” (Hamraie 2013). Aimi Hamraie argues that the look or visual vocabulary of an architectural mode, called parti, can be at once both aesthetic, and imply use by particular kinds of bodies using particular kinds of technological assistance (2013). In this sense, although ramps at the entrances to buildings or between floors or levels can serve all members of an urban population, the accessibility ramp is often imagined as being “for” a wheelchair user—perhaps the white stick figure of the international “handicap” sign.
This evokes what Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star have described as the “slippage between a standard and its realization in action” (2009, 15). Presumably, whoever ordered the ramp built might check off the word “ramp” on some checklist of items required for renovations; or, they might want a ramp in front of their store to convey some quality that a ramp evoked. That is, an accessibility ramp might have multiple uses beyond its titular intention. This idea echoed a theme that is familiar both in stories about Russia and in ethnography—that is, a gap between intended and actual use or meaning, the emic and the etic. In the Russian case, the concept of “Potemkin villages” offers a shorthand for something that appears to exist, but turns out only to be a facade (e.g., Bernstein 2013, 42–66).
But what is a ramp actually? A ramp is a machine. In fact, a ramp, called an inclined plane in physics, is one of the five simple machines that make up the basic building blocks of mechanical engineering (Hendren 2017 (originally published by Hendren on her then website, slopeintercept.org, in 2012). Along with the wheel and axle, the screw, the lever, and the pulley, the ramp is one of the five basic mechanical tools. Each of these simple machines redirects energy or force in a particular way; designers and engineers put them together and in combination to form the tools that make up our world (Asimov 1966, 88). In a classic popular physics book, physicist Isaac Asimov describes how a ramp “works” with the example how one might use a ramp to aide in loading a barrel onto a truck; the ramp “dilutes” the amount of force used to raise the barrel to the height of the truck bed, in proportion to the slope and length of the ramp (a longer ramp will dilute the force more, but require transporting the barrel across a longer distance) (1966, 91–92). In introductory physics, to consider this relationship of slope, length, and force, students are often instructed to discount friction. Physicists consider friction to be an “imperfection” in the environment, which inhibits the flow of kinetic energy (Asimov 1966-98). But friction is also a factor in allowing for passage up and down an incline—only by calculating the friction can a physicist or engineer know how difficult it will really be to move an object up and down a ramp. In the real world, not the imagined world of physical modeling, humans need a certain amount of friction to move up and down an incline plane without slipping and simply sliding to the bottom.
Extending Anna Tsing's concept of friction by combining it with the physics of ramps might point ethnology in an interesting direction. In many ways, the ramp as a design element or architectural feature has moved through multiple cultural or ontological spheres to arrive on the streets of Petrozavodsk and in pixelated images on my internet browser. What are the tensions and incongruences of meaning and interpretation that have aided the accessibility ramp in spreading and replicating across multiple global contexts? At what points are students of access or purveyors of human rights instructed, like physics students, to “ignore friction”?
Friction in Function and Form
In the spring of 2013, I recorded an interview with Anya, a psychologist and a power wheelchair user. Anya was a compelling person to interview. Not only did she frequently talk for long stretches at a time with only minimal prompting, but she was also a keen observer, had sharp sense of humor, and was highly entertaining. She often deployed her sarcastic wit to drive home the absurdity of a particularly element of inaccessibility—a tactic that many disability activists in the West will find a familiar element of telling inaccess stories.
For some reason they are trying to make the buildings of certain social services, or medical facilities, or the town hall and mayor's office, accessible. Like, they did something with the grounds of the pension office, and then something else. But how useful is building a ramp to the town hall, if I can’t get down the stairs from my apartment?! [laughing] How am I supposed to use a ramp to the town hall? I think that in the first place, they need to adapt the entranceways (pod”ezdy) of the buildings where people with disabilities live. To start from there and work on out. To make public transportation accessible! … Like in Finland—I showed up, I stood at the bus stop, a bus came, laid down a ramp, I got on, the doors closed, and we were off. What's so bad about that?! … I don’t need a ramp at the pharmacy if I can’t get out of my house!
… if we do have a ramp, it's covered in snow and no one shovels it!
But who ever said life would be easy? No one promised an easy life! [pause; then, sarcastically, thinking of how hard it is to get around in the winter] It's our little way of doing rehab!”
In this quote, Anya observed that recent construction in the city had seemed to prioritize making accessible particular buildings that had some official function related to the state—the post office, the courthouse, or the town hall and mayor's office. These isolated islands of accessible passages remained disconnected from the broader network of transportation and passageways. Without the broader grid of the city undergoing similar renovations, a ramp to the town hall, to Anya, seemed to be an empty gesture, a cruel joke.
Anya imagined an alternate universe in which people-centered design would consider her home space, which she had adapted herself, as ground zero, and work out from there. Instead, accessibility started at points of state power, as a symbolic expression of the Russian Federation's compliance with the minimum standards of international norms of access. Anya drove home this point by drawing a comparison between her own city and cities in neighboring Finland.
Anya's monologue illustrated that for an accessibility ramp to function, a person must have already arrived at the bottom (or top) of the ramp. If a wheelchair-user could not get out of her house, or across town on public transportation, she would not be able to make use of a perfectly executed design element in the new shopping mall downtown. Ramps as tools to facilitate access to public space in Russia, even if perfectly executed as discrete architectural elements, often did not function fully, as a ramp presumed certain other technological minimums, which may not have been met. As part of a heterogeneous network of sociotechnological actors (Callon 1991), such ramps may or may not find convergence with other elements.
FIGURE 6. Pedestrians navigate a snowy sidewalk and courtyard driveway in a residential neighborhood of Petrozavodsk. Apartment buildings in the late-Soviet style surround the courtyard and the entrance to a neighborhood grocery. The ground is covered with compacted snow and appears to be slippery and hard. One family pushes a child in a stroller that has sleigh runners in place of wheels, a popular option for navigating the city in winter with toddlers. Photo by Cassandra Hartblay, 2013.
That is, a ramp alone is only an indicator of access; the ramp requires numerous other elements of the infrastructure to converge to actually function for access. Ideally, a ramp functions as an enabling device or technology, allowing for what Moser and Law (1999) have called “good passage,” a sense of smoothness, where otherwise social boundaries might need to be broken, such as requests for help getting over a threshold or up a set of steps.3 As Anya's narrative illustrates, however, there are multiple ways in which the diverse elements or sociotechnological actors in the infrastructure may not align to promote the function of the ramp. In these cases, the form of the ramp, and its symbolic function as a “disability thing” and element of global design culture remain, but its active function as a technology of access is lost.4
Consider another example: for wheelchair users, the usefulness of a ramp presupposes a wheelchair. If there are no wheelchairs, or if wheelchairs are broken, a ramp is not a useful tool (of course, a well-built ramp can still be a preferable option to stairs for ambulatory people with chronic fatigue or impaired mobility). An unevenness in the distribution of wheelchair technology is a significant problem for access both in Petrozavodsk and in the former Soviet Union more broadly. Sarah Phillips (2011) has documented the ways in which wheelchair users in post-Soviet Ukraine worked to form complex alliances to convince business owners and government agencies to support the manufacture, purchase, and distribution of well-designed wheelchairs in the 1990s and early 2000s. Wheelchairs are expensive, usually manufactured abroad, and difficult to obtain. Because the supply and distribution of wheelchairs is slow and unreliable, if a part breaks or wears out, they can be difficult to fix.
In Petrozavodsk, Anya complained that the frequently encountered rail ramp design (a ramp that is not a flat incline plane but rather two rails installed over a staircase into which the wheels must fit) tended to wear out the treads on her automatic chair's tires as they rubbed the sides of the railings. This caused additional problems, because the tires were expensive and a hassle to replace.
Alina from the art therapy group waited six months of 2012 for the replacement part for her broken manual wheelchair. She was able to borrow another chair to get around in, although it did not fit her as well. We laughed when I came to visit, because the broken wheelchair took up so much space in her room that she had taken to using it as a desk chair while she waited for a replacement part. In another interview, she told me that when she was taking courses at a community college three miles from home, she would often “walk” (her mother Valya pushing her chair), because it was too difficult to get lifted on and off of the city bus. Like Anya's complaint, this situation illustrated the ways in which particular elements of the sociotechnological infrastructure of Petrozavodsk were inaccessible. This led wheelchair users to create alternative networks or pathways that facilitated smooth passages.
These objects—wheelchairs, ramps, and other design elements (or their absence)—can be understood as part of a sociotechnological network, in that they are always embedded in social relations. It is not only an object that facilitates access but also social attitudes that foster or dismiss the implementation of design elements for their intended use. As geographers of access have argued (Church and Marston 2003, 84–85), whether or not access is provided in an absolute or a checkmark sense does little to explain the complex spatial and temporal experiences of partial, limited, and occasional access that people with mobility impairments tend to encounter in navigating the built environment. In this way, the nuanced definition of access as a globally circulating concept related to disability rights always hinges on the relationship between a given person and the social, cultural, and material environment around them.
When ramps, wheelchairs, and other technologies of access and elements of accessible design move into post-Soviet spaces unevenly, their function is compromised by gaps in the network of sociotechnological actors. This means that whether or not a ramp is a checkmark ramp, or visibly nonadherent to the formal design principles that facilitate good passages, from the perspective of the wheelchair user, the ramp may not be fully functional.
Checklists as Smooth Passage
The checklist, as well as the ramp, is a particular kind of technology. Bowker and Star discuss the list as a particular tool of modern bureaucracy and civilization (1999, 137). Foucault (1970), they argue, conceptualizes the list as key to the development of modern science—for example, the elaboration of kinds of animals or plants in the elevation of biology from a rich man's hobby to a science. Latour (1987) also considers lists—as physical objects that can be shuffled and compared, moved across space, and held as proof of protocol by a bureaucrat. In this way, Bowker and Star note, list making is “foundational for coordinating activity distributed in time and space” (1999, 138). It attempts to streamline, coordinate, or make congruent a decision-making process that occurs across space and time. The list also produces a certain expectation of reality, in that it presupposes a bureaucratic action that might be applied “in response to a recurrent situation” (Bowker and Star 1999, 138).
In this sense, list-making technology becomes an important tool in the execution of the infrastructure of modernity. As particular ideas, forms, or norms are disseminated through a geographic territory, lists serve to normalize and standardize practices of design and implementation. As power has taken different forms, so too has the reach of the list and its norms. Now, as the flows of global capital distribute ideas and technologies across uneven cultural settings, lists and norms attempting to reproduce infrastructures of modernity are taken up and implemented in a diversity of cultural settings in which the meanings of the products they presuppose are heterogeneous and contested. That is, precisely because lists attempt to standardize across time and space, they operate as a system for managing the heterogeneity and disagreements of global friction (Bowker and Star 1999, 139).
A suspicion of norms, and of modernity's obsession with the mean or average body, is central to disability studies (Canguilhem 1989; Davis 2006; McRuer 2006). Yet, disability rights activists working in global contexts rely on norms or standards as central technologies of list-making to disseminate the principles of accessible design to diverse global contexts (Djumagulova 2004; Kohrman 2005; Abilis Foundation 2014). Concerns with material and environmental inaccessibility as bound up in the social exclusion of people with disabilities are central to both the theoretical debates unfolding in disability studies (Imrie 1996; Charlton 2010) and international development and human rights discourses. Standardized modes of constructing accessible infrastructure, characterized by specific norms in the form of measurements and materials—the architectural building codes that make up accessible design—are considered to offer potentially universal solutions (even as many disability scholars and activists rebuke the very idea of “universal”). In this way building standards, or norms, already occupy a place of tension in relation to accessible infrastructures. Even as disability studies is wary of norms, or norming, when it comes to disseminating elements of the built environment, disability advocates may opt to “ignore friction.” Even as list-making is a tool to smooth difference, and therefore checklists always function in friction, individual components of the list (e.g., the aesthetic look of a ramp, the check mark itself) may become fetishized and sought after as ends in themselves.
What happens when we apply these problems to the checkmark list and ramp-building habits in Petrozavodsk? If we consider checklists as universal standards that are developed in relation to international building code standards, a checklist could be a functional tool used to implement accessible design principles in Petrozavodsk. If, however, checklists are haphazardly implemented, or the details are not upheld, something that “looks like” a ramp may come to stand in for an actual tool for accessibility. By exploring some of the anecdotes and tensions on the ground in Petrozavodsk, we can see how these frictions play out in the logic of checkmark ramps.
Minimum Requirements and the Logic of Checklists
The first time I visited Anya, she told me to come over for tea, and gave a date and time and an address. Soon enough, I found myself in the back of a worse-for-wear taxi (in the way of the region, a used sedan with a little plastic taxi marker on top, and the phone number of the dispatching company plastered across the windshield and passenger window with vinyl numbers), explaining to the driver that, in fact, I did not know where in the sprawling complex the particular set of buildings I was looking for was located, because it was my first time going there. I kept checking my phone, because I realized that as we drove in and out of courtyard driveways looking for building numbers posted by various entranceways, I was possibly going to be late. I zoomed in and out on the Yandex map app in vain. In 2012, the app had not yet added enough detail to find specific addresses in apartment complexes in the city. I tried the Google maps app, knowing it was even less helpful. Finally, the cab driver found what seemed to be the correct pod’’ezd (or entranceway), according to the number on a small enamel plaque on the side of the building. I hastily paid in paper rubles and thanked him and hopped out of the cab onto the frozen-but-not-yet-snowy ground, the last yellow leaves of autumn gathering and turning brown in corners of the courtyard.
When I found the right doorway, I called Anya, and she told me her mother would buzz me up. The stairwell to the sixth-floor apartment was shabby but warm and dry, and there were not many belongings clustered on the landings as in some shared entranceways. A late-middle-age woman was standing at the door, holding it open, when I turned onto the sixth floor landing. She waved me in, and did not say much, just a brief hello, and then pointed to where I should put my bag and hang my coat, and a quiet declaration, tapochki!, pointing at a pair of house slippers reserved for guests. I shuffled after her, my phone in hand and bag on my shoulder, and she led me down a hallway nicely renovated with light-colored wood furniture and laminate flooring, and pointed to a doorway where Anya sat in an electric wheelchair, smiling and waiting. Her mother turned and rushed off to another room, and Anya explained something about her brother's children, then, calling over her shoulder as she turned, led me into her small bedroom with a neatly made bed, dresser, and desk, and pointed to a desk chair. I felt flustered and breathless after the dizzying cab ride through the potholed courtyards, and my climb up the stairs. But Anya wasted no time, diving right in to getting acquainted. I was impressed by her quick wit, sharp intellect, and knowing sarcasm. Anya had attended university and completed a master's degree in psychology at the city's university. When we met, she was working as a psychologist in a program outside of the city relying on her mother to transport her the long drive in each direction; she later was hired at a new municipal center for adults with disabilities, closer to her home. She had a critical, analytical style of thinking and a way of sharing a point of view in a manner that invited the listener into a conspiratorial insider perspective. Anya soon became the interlocutor that I turned to when I found myself looking for a grounded perspective.
Anya was also a master of the inaccess story as a genre. During one interview, I asked Anya to tell me what she thought about the concept of accessibility in the built environment. I used the phrase bezbar’ernaia sreda (literally, a barrier-free area or surrounding environment), a conceptual and linguistic translation from international disability activism. Disability activists in Petrozavodsk used this term when talking to the media about accessibility in the downtown area, drawing on examples from ongoing activism in Moscow (facilitated by internationally connected disability rights organizations), which they followed online. In this sense, Anya's response to my question was to immediately situate bezbar’ernaia sreda in the Russian context, as a traveling term that had to be distinguished from the Western contexts from which it had been adapted.
Accessible space—bezbar’ernaia sreda? It's a painful question. The law on accessible space, well … last year they rewrote it several times, so that in the end they could implement it. I was following one particular point in the law. […] there's this word, “minimum conditions of a barrier-free environment.” I thought about that and realized that the word minimum is the key word. That someone could just argue that this word—here is the standard. I’d be saying, “You understand, that we have a right, as everywhere else, to the minimum standards of a barrier-free environment.” And they’d answer, “Sure, our ramp is set at the wrong angle of incline—that's nothing, because the main thing is that a ramp is there! So, take a look, here are your minimum conditions.” And I’d say that this is wrong, but I can’t prove that it's wrong. There's no way to beat it. So, in this sense, I guess you could say that [the law] is written exactly how they wanted it.
In this discussion, Anya expressed the sense of frustration that she felt about the notion of accessible public space. Although the phrase for the concept (bezbariarnaia sreda) is now standardized in Russian, the real-world work of implementing the concept, through a system of legal rights, seems to her to apply to some other place and to have been adopted in Russia only symbolically. Bezbariarnaia sreda as a concept traveled in friction. Anya's inaccess story is laden with multiple layers of meaning. This is evident in her example: “Sure, our ramp is set at the wrong angle of incline—that's nothing, because the main thing is that a ramp is there!” On the one hand, Anya is making a joke: In Russia, she implied, we define things (like accessibility) to wiggle around them. On the other hand, she was speaking seriously. As a power wheelchair user, whose mobility device was too heavy to be easily lifted, she very much counted on ramps to be able to get in and out of buildings. She had personally overseen the installation of a ramp outside her apartment building and of several installations at a previous place of employment—never without significant hassle (a story that will be familiar to power chair users both in Russia and elsewhere). Although this latter experience could be part of a litany of complaints from a wheelchair user anywhere in the world, the particular cadence of her interpellation of legal code as difficult to enforce aligned with broader Russian conversations about government accountability and paying lip service to rather than integrity in implementation.
In Anya's experience, a “minimum requirement” was the requirement that might have a chance of being met (but only after a long process of complaint, threats, and incorrect or unacceptable half-hearted stop-gap measures). Anything above and beyond a minimum requirement simply would not be considered, she insinuated. In her description of these minimum standards, Anya used the common Russian construction of assigning actions to an unnamed “they”—that is, the faceless mass of government bureaucracy or the powers that be. Who, I wondered, were “they”? Who was actually responsible for designing, building, and assessing the implementation of accessibility ramps?
The question of responsibility was a natural consideration in the course of inaccess stories, particularly inaccess stories about ramps or places that purported to provide access but did not. In the spring of 2013 Anya tried to get a ramp built in the entranceway to her new apartment, having moved a few doors down from the apartment that she previously shared with her parents. Unfortunately, no one from the building management knew what she was talking about, and no one was convinced that it was their job to build such a ramp. In Anya's telling, she left several messages for her building manager over the course of two months; she joked that they began simply answering the phone and hanging up to get rid of her when they saw her number on the caller ID. Finally, she announced that she was calling the local media to do a story on the fact that no one was responding to her request; a handyman showed up shortly, and in Anya's estimation, spent about fifteen minutes laying an asphalt wedge along half of the single step in front of her apartment building entrance. The work was not great, but it allowed her to get on and off the stoop daily on her way to work and back without ruining her tires. Haphazard, off-the-cuff ramps like this were frequently built onto storefronts and homes as afterthoughts, by workers who had little or no training and paid little attention to building codes. The proliferation of “bad” access ramps that failed to provide access suggested the inextricable link between access and the precarious labor conditions of those whose work was intended to provide that access. This reality of access labor in neoliberal conditions—or “crip times” as McRuer (2018) has put it—can be demoralizing. Anya explained:
The worst [part of talking with other people with disabilities] is when you run into this question: “What's the point of it all? All the same nothing changes…. ” You understand that if everyone talked like this, that nothing changes, then really nothing would change. So, I start from the beginning, explaining to everyone, so they don’t decide it for everyone…. It's a drop in the bucket. Take your little contribution and make it useful for something, and your little tiny drop in the bucket helps a stranger and then something changes. But if everyone will go around saying that nothing changes, then oops, nothing changes.
Why should the state be thinking about how to make it easier for us to live? [incredulous] The state doesn’t need to think about anyone and it doesn’t have to do anything for anyone. If you don’t take care of yourself, no one else is going to take care of you…. Why should you get used to the idea that someone should be looking out for you, if you have your own head to work from and you can look out for yourself? … and then help someone, and look out for someone else … look out for someone who needs your help, or protection or support.
Every drop in the bucket counts, if each person will make their own little contribution. The laws are written, and if there are strange and not very honest people driving the bus, then you and your crew have to do something so that the laws work in your favor. And if you came and met with resistance and you say, “Oh, I’m not doing that anymore,” … then it ends up that that side won and that's it. I understand that it doesn’t have to be this way, but that's how it worked out and we can change it only with our own power.
Anya suggested that a moral person is obligated to continue to work toward access justice, even when justice remains elusive. She argued that advocates had to work together and persevere, especially because accessibility policy in Russia was continually undermined by the notorious gap between Russia's written laws and their implementation in Russian society.
Wheelchair user and multimedia-artist Rudak offered another perspective. I met Rudak through a mutual friend at a concert in a popular basement venue in the center of the city where his band was playing. His bandmate who was a friend of a friend introduced us before the show, and after a brief interview, Rudak invited me to message him to talk more in the future. Then his bandmates lifted him and his manual wheelchair on stage to start tuning up for the show. A few weeks later, at his mother's apartment on the east side of the city, he showed me the band's YouTube page and his documentary and feature film work at the desktop computer in a combination sitting room–bedroom (typical for Russian apartments), and then acquiesced to a general interview over tea at the kitchen table. When I asked Rudak about how inaccessible ramps came to be, he responded:
Why are they cropping up (voznikaiut)? Because, first of all, the people building these ramps are doing it so that the ramp exists. So if someone asks them, “Do you have a ramp?” Not a person with a disability, but a person, let's say, from some kind of committee or something like that asks. Someone or other comes with a clipboard and whatever documents, and puts down a check mark (galochka), like “That's it! Access for the disabled is accounted for (obespechen)!”
Rudak's description stressed that business owners build ramps merely to satisfy “some kind of committee, or something like that,” with little regard for promoting accessibility for people with mobility impairments. Like Nina, he summed up this theory with the idea that the builders will put a check mark on some imagined document or form, with the check mark rhetorically glossing an inferred hierarchy of accountability and politics of implementation (Lampland and Star 2009). Rudak was vague about which committee, precisely, was responsible for access—he was not sure. Yet he had extensive embodied knowledge about when and how he did experience access.
In another scenario, Anya and Rudak, along with another local activist, worked to find out who in the town administration was responsible for enforcing building codes. The train station in the center of town was scheduled to be renovated, and they wanted to ensure that the renovation would include ramps and elevators to facilitate wheelchair access to the platforms (currently accessible only by stairway). Having narrowed down responsibility to one of two possible offices, they were curtly informed by bureaucratic workers in each department that the question of enforcing building codes was out of their respective jurisdictions. The activists then obtained a letter from a federal agency, which stated that, according to federal law, an office in the city administration must accept responsibility for this role. But, having obtained this letter, and presented it to the same offices to no avail, the activists were stumped. Aside from the state, they could think of no organization with the authority to enforce the building codes. After Rudak first shared this story in 2013, I made a habit of asking him if there were any major developments; in 2014, he remarked that he would not be surprised if it never happened. In the end, it was a historian colleague working abroad who happened to read the Petrozavodsk news and share a news clip documenting the installation of an elevator in the train station at long last.
In this sense, my interlocutors who are wheelchair users had a fairly good sense of how these unstudied ramps get built at apartment buildings, and they also had limited ideas about how to enforce a standard of access. This made other type of ramps that existed in the city—the architecturally designed, professionally built ramps that could be found in front of government buildings or in shopping malls—somewhat of a mystery. I asked Rudak how he thought that these ramps came to be built according to standards of accessible design, and he suggested that the reason that these well-designed ramps could be found only in such buildings is that shopping malls were simply built according to existing modular plans adapted from European cities, and the ramps happened to come along with the design. That is, in his estimation, a well-designed and well-executed accessibility ramp, by definition was not Russian, and could not have originated in a Russian context. The details of how ramps traveled in friction into designs for new construction in Petrozavodsk turned out to be somewhat different.
Checklists, Norms, and Standards: Technologies for Distributing Expertise
I brought my questions about architecture and accessibility to a nondisabled friend, Olya, who worked as an assistant in a Petrozavodsk architectural firm. At that time she already had completed most of a four-year degree in civil engineering, and she was preparing to take the licensing exams. We had known each other for several years, and she knew that my research was on how disabled people—invalidy—lived in the city.
Thinking of the checkmark ramps, I asked Olya to record a proper interview, repeating for my digital recorder what she had explained to me in a casual conversation as we sat in a grassy city park eating chips out of a bag while other friends played frisbee nearby. Later, sitting in my apartment, suddenly and uncharacteristically shy in the presence of the recorder, Olya explained that using checklists to ensure that draft plans for new buildings were in agreement with building codes (normy in Russian) was a key element of her job.
O: I work in a company that does contracting for residential buildings, public buildings, sports complexes, and so on. And, I work in the architectural division. And—mostly our work is to see to it that all the building codes are fulfilled. And, included in those are norms for—[pausing to emphasize or recall the official term] accommodations for low-mobility groups in the population.
C: What are some of the other codes?
O: Other codes? Well, for example, mmm. There are codes to make sure that there is good natural lighting in a room. […] There are codes, for example, so that the toilet in your apartment isn’t next to the living room of a neighboring apartment. That's against regulations. Because it would be bad if there were a leak—it wouldn’t be very pleasant! There are lots of codes, in general. Really a lot. You have to set the thickness of the walls, the thickness of roofing, so that people will be warm, and—so that it will be comfortable, and you won’t hear your neighbors, and so on. So, among all of those, now these last few years, they’ve really been actively following up with implementing codes for people with limited mobility (malomobilʹnykh grupp) … in the population. That is—this goes for wheelchair users (invalidy-koliasochniki), and, also for pregnant women, women with strollers, mothers … like, there are a lot of these people.
Olya went on to explain to me that her work was made up of verifying numerous, seemingly unrelated measurable elements of a building plan with established norms. Although she intellectually recognized that each norm was based on a particular corresponding function (e.g., thick walls and roofs so that people could stay warm), her job was not to establish the norms, or work out the norms, but rather to verify that the architects who laid out the plans met the existing norms. In her telling, she made sure to demonstrate to me that the work of meeting standards regarding access was not set apart from the other elements of her job, but rather was included in the same manner and importance as light, heat, and sound. She emphasized repeatedly that there were “a lot of norms—really a lot!” Later in the interview, she elaborated: “It's an interesting job, of course, but sometimes it can be—tedious to work out. Like, when you’re like, [adopts a sarcastically delighted voice] ‘I’ll come in! I will draw a building! I’ll add staircases! Oh, it's so pretty!!’ [returning to her normal voice and cadence] But, in reality, you are sitting there with all these building codes (normy). And you spend a lot of time on it.”
Olya contrasted her vision of architecture as a romanticized, exciting career and a chance to change her environment by building her world, with the much more mundane reality of checking figures. This, she emphasized, was the actual content of her work: endless verification. Checking that the elements of a given design met the standards established for accessibility for “people with limited mobility” in Olya's telling was not an afterthought or chore, but rather was a routinized element of her work, seamlessly integrated with others.
I asked Olya how it was that the norms for groups with limited mobility came to be instituted.
O: I don’t know exactly what year it started. But, when I started with this work, the first job, well, it was like four years about. And—it was already, like—well, they were trying. To implement it. Lately, they’re really strict that we follow up on this.
C: What does strict mean?
O: That—it means that—we have to do it, so that there's a ramp, with the right incline. So that we can’t just—you know, how a lot are done, like lean some kind of board up against something, and say, so there it is—a ramp. We are obligated to do it so that it has a comfortable incline [—] so that a person can get in and out. We are obligated, like I said, to make a nice big bathroom stall. An elevator. Et cetera.
In this exchange, Olya contrasted the work of using checklists with nonexpert vernacular design, like the ramp outside of Anya's apartment, which she implied was haphazard and unprofessional. In Olya's estimation, it seemed that part of the utility of a strict building code was a more beautiful and well-executed public space. Without professional norms and standards to follow, ramps and other elements of the built environment might be poorly executed. In other conversations, Olya, like Anya, described the jolt of jealousy she felt every time she crossed the border of the Russian Federation into Europe. Immediately, she said, the roads were smoother. The sidewalks were not only well designed but also well executed, and the bus stop shelters were new. I often heard her joke with friends about how poorly the infrastructure of the city stacked up to other cities they had visited abroad. Although Olya was busily making plans to continue to live in Petrozavodsk—she recently had married and bought an apartment—she wanted to live in a Petrozavodsk that looked more like Helsinki or Stockholm.
Olya's “obligation” to ensure that her bosses’ drawings met building code standards was therefore, for her, not only busy work, but actually linked to a real-world outcome: a built environment to be proud of, that functioned well, and that expressed her professional expertise. She went on to explain how the building code was enforced.
O: […] So, it's not just that we have to follow up on all of this. There's a regulating body (kontroliruiushchaia organizatsiia) that then checks over all the projects, and says, well, orders corrections on mistakes. And, then we fix them. It's not only—it's not just about accommodating the movements of people with limited mobilities. It's also about all the other regulations in general, too.
[… then,] when we finish a project we give it to the expert review panel—[it's called] ekspertiza. It's made up of educated people, who sit on the panel and look out for everyone. For compliance with all the regulations (za sobliudeniem vsekh norm). When they say, yes, you have it all correct, theoretically, only then can work start on the project. Like, construction on the project can go ahead and begin. But, more often (laughs), construction is already underway while the plan is still being worked out (both laugh). So then it's going on in parallel sort of, so the work is coordinating it all, and moreover, then to make it all match up, to finish building peacefully, and so on. So, like, in order to not have to throw out the final construction, we’ll start to build the building. [The project financer] could, at any moment, on his judgment, take his resources and leave.
Olya's description of the role of checklists in ensuring accessibility standards revealed a Russian design expert culture that was concerned with executing their work according to the highest European professional standards. In Olya's perception, civil engineering in Petrozavodsk ought to be considered in relation to that in geographically comparable international cities, rather than only in relation to the Russian domestic sphere.
In contrast to Rudak's supposition that ramps in Petrozavodsk shopping malls came about because the building plan was copied from a European shopping mall, in Olya's telling, each building and each renovation was carefully designed by trained Russian professionals. As professionals, she and her colleagues executed the elements of design laid out in checklists, including the checklist for malomobilʹnye gruppy. According to Olya's perspective, it was not at the architectural stage that plans for accessibility standards broke down, but rather in the hands of the building contractor. This was not about Soviet bureaucracy, but rather about the precarity of public–private negotiations of capital in neoliberalism. Olya retold a story that she had shared before. She recalled it, in particular, because it represented a moment of ethical conflict. She had recognized it as a point when the execution of accessibility norms broke down.
There was this big building (dom). It was divided into two floors. And, they needed to make some kind of way to get to the second floor. They made this giant, enormous ramp. It was for cars and people and everything else. And, along the edge of the ramp, they made a handrail. There were high ones—according to the regulations they have to be [something like] 100 centimeters—and a lower one. It could be for children, or for wheelchair users (invalidov-koliasochnikov). That is, we do all of this. We drafted everything. When these railings or handrails went—to the people who—well, who make them, from metal, they calculated the cost, and they sent it to our boss, and said, That's expensive. Take out the handrail for invalidy (invalidov). So [the project underwriter] took it upon himself and just got rid of it. I don’t know, how it all happened—[but in the end when I visited the building, there was only one railing].
When I asked her to elaborate, Olya explained that the project foreman proposed some changes to cut costs. When the revised plans were presented to her, she refused to sign off on changes that did not meet the building code. But, she shrugged, embarrassed, someone else must have signed off.
In these tellings, both the architect and the ramp users failed to imagine one another as individuals and disregarded each other's expertise. Olya's story suggested that the architects would point fingers at the builders for being at fault in moments when norms were not upheld. They would not think to reach out to ramp users to raise a fuss about an oversight in execution. In Olya's telling, wheelchair users were the recipients of a built environment, not the codesigners. As a mere employee, Olya, and the sanctity of her checklists, were ineffectual in the face of a bottom line. In an economy of capitalism, scarcity, and every-person-for-themself, if the one footing the bill wanted to take out a handrail, that was his or her gamble to make, regardless of how well Olya's drawing executed the elements of the checklist.
Anya also described a scenario in which building norms were subverted at the hands of builders. In her case, however, it was not the boss overriding a well-designed plan, but rather, day laborers following orders and guessing what a ramp should look like.
At the Martial Springs retreat center (Martsial’niye Vody) they made a ramp, so that you could get [from the main building] down to the spring. The springs with the healing waters are down the hill and leading down to them is a long staircase. And last year, the good people [sarcasm] decided to build a ramp down to the springs.5 And it ended up, that at the same time that they were doing the renovation work, my mom happened to be driving in to the resort. She saw what they were up to and stopped and asked, “What are we doing?” and they answered her, “We’re making a ramp.” And mom says, “You’re not building a ramp, because I can already see that a wheelchair won’t be able to get through there.” They started to wave some documents around, they go, “we have the regulations (normy), we have the standards (standarty)!” And so, Mama says, “I don’t need your standards, I am talking to you as a person who has spent 35 years of my life with an invalid, and I am saying that a wheelchair won’t be able to get through here.
So, what do you think happened? They erected the ramp all the same. And … so then it ended up that I started to bug them to redo the ramp. I chipped away at them and in the end they redid it.
In this telling, the fault for an inaccessible accessibility ramp fell on the day laborers tasked with building it. Again, a barrier of class or identity separated the executor of the ramp design from the user. The user's perspective was subverted to the laborer's informal checklist: Use the materials they were given, build something that looked like something else they had seen, follow the instructions they were given, get paid, and go home. These black-and-white norms and instructions overrode Anya's mother's lived experience as a source of expertise. Operating in conditions of scarcity, and as laborers, the workers had instructions to follow that aligned with hierarchies of command, and they could not be interrupted by horizontal avenues of advice from a passerby. In these cases, the purpose of the ramp and its meaning existed in friction between each set of parties involved. Inaccess stories told by wheelchair users revealed the gaps that existed between their disability expertise about what made an infrastructure accessible and the failure of legal, technical, and capitalist systems to implement access.
On the Circulation of Images and the Aesthetics of Access
The inaccess stories that my interlocutors told based on their disability expertise were one kind of story that I heard about inaccessible accessibility ramps. The images of ramps and stories about inaccess—like the one that the journalist recorded at the theater building in Petrozavodsk in July 2012—circulated independently of disability expertise. Not only bad ramps, but also images of bad ramps, images of access, and images of disability circulated in popular culture, not through crip counterpublics but as part of the second type of inaccess story—that is, a critique of how things are, as a metonym for social breakdown.
One afternoon in the fall of 2012, I was sitting in my fourth-floor walk-up apartment in Petrozavodsk, editing fieldnotes on my laptop. A Facebook alert pinged. A colleague from the United States, halfway across Russia conducting his own fieldwork, had sent me a link. I clicked. The link led to an Imgur thread—an image gallery of seventeen photos, all showing inaccessible accessibility ramps.6 Here was one ramp in which the railing to the adjoining steps actually cut off access between the stoop and the ramp. Here was another—in my experience ubiquitous in Saint Petersburg and Moscow metro entrances—which consisted of nothing more than a pair of inch-and-a-half wide metal rails, screwed into the granite steps, and descending at the same steep angle. The spaces pictured in the image gallery are marked as Russian by Cyrillic signs in the background and by architectural vernacular. Another version of the same meme had circulated first on the Russian-speaking internet. In this case, the images were presented on a blog as an amassed body of evidence that the Russian authorities had failed to provide an accessible environment for its citizens with disabilities. A popular subject with Russian journalists interested in uncovering government incompetence, a Russian-language Google image search for further images of inaccessible ramps (nedostupnyi pandus) produced numerous examples. On the Anglophone internet, the meme circulated as an example of irony (inaccessible accessibility!) and Russian incompetence.
How do images of inaccessible accessible design work as social critique? Design as a practice is an exercise in world-making. As Kim Kullman has put it, “recognizing the world-making capacities of design methods necessitates attending to the very ‘designing of design,’ or the ways in which the processes and sites of design are themselves designed, as these shape what design can become” (Kullman 2016, 74; Fry 1999, 5). In the case of the way that mediascapes of disability access “things” circulate and garner symbolic value in contemporary Russia, we might invert the paradigm. Here, accessible design becomes something quite different than its intended technological usage in design process had foretold. Images of accessible design technologies in Russia operate as symbolic vessels for broader cultural critiques of social and political infrastructure and affective valences of comfort and discomfiture.
The Imgur thread, as a meme, quickly replicated on the English-language internet. Web analytics show that the image has been successively shared at a steady rate since it was posted in September 2012, with a slight surge around the time when I first viewed it, again shortly after, and again around the time of the Sochi Olympic Games, when a similar meme (#SochiProblems) highlighting shoddy construction in the Olympic Village also circulated.
In the fall of 2012, the gear-up for the Sochi Olympics of 2014 had just begun in Russia. The Olympic committee had promised to make the Olympic village “the most accessible ever.” This goal came up short, however, according to disability activists (Andrea Mazzarino, personal communication). But the inaccessibility of the Olympic Village infrastructure became a footnote in a much larger story about infrastructure and inaccess: In the week before the games, foreign journalists arrived to find a barely finished, slap-dash infrastructure rife with awkward mistakes and indications of rushed, haphazard construction. The news media around the globe tweeted and blogged about half-finished sidewalks, oddly installed bathroom fixtures, and faulty hotel doorknobs. As the Olympics opened (even though one ring did not) the Russian predilection for constructing subpar infrastructure was paraded as a touchstone in both Western and Russian comedy. When the Paralympics opened several weeks later, the media in both Russia and the West largely overlooked the immense changes in the ways that Russian official discourse has recognized disability issues since the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Sarah Phillips has documented, the last time the Olympics were held in Russia, in 1980, the official statement about Paralympic athletes was quite different: “A Western journalist inquired whether the Soviet Union would participate in the first Paralympic games, scheduled to take place in Great Britain later that year. The reply from a Soviet representative was swift, firm, and puzzling: ‘There are no invalids in the USSR!’” (Fefelov 1986, cited in Phillips 2009, 1).
By 2014, not only did Russia host the Paralympics, support Paralympic teams, and pay lip service to infrastructural accessibility in the Olympic village, but the country also ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.7 Putin met with a group of select Paralympic athletes in the lead up to the games, and children with disabilities across Russia had the opportunity to participate in adaptive sports. In this way, adults with disabilities in Russia, having seen enormous change in the course of their lifetimes in terms of the state's relationship to disability and the public visibility of access, now had the dubious distinction of being able to join in and share with the rest of Russia a collective embarrassment over the gap between what was promised and what the government and its contractors actually delivered.
The hashtag #SochiProblems, which became popular on Twitter in the weeks leading up to the games, and continued to circulate thereafter, harnessed a register of complaint familiar to Russians and Westerners: complaints about the problem of failed infrastructure. The hashtag indicated and made memetic and searchable a genre of images cataloging infrastructural failures in and around the Olympic village. Here, inaccess stories, spliced with a fail-blog ethos, became an international joke du jour. Complaints about infrastructural failure in the Olympic Village fit into a familiar pattern of critique: Russia's failure to manifest Euroamerican modernity. In many iterations, this failure signified corruption: the contractors, landholders, and officials each scraping something off the top, leaving a reduced budget for the actual implementation of the planned infrastructure. In this way, the #SochiProblems meme suggested a fail-blog-style critique of Russian cripwashing, and the popular recognition of cripwashing as a technique of power in the Russian Federation. These critiques came from both an orientation of disability expertise—for example, one year after the Sochi Olympics, a disability advocacy blog reported that none of the wheelchair lifts installed along public stairwells in preparation for the Olympics remained in working order (neinvalid.ru 2015)—and from the general public.
Complaints about infrastructural failure and disability in Western conversations tend to assume that disabled people, encountering barriers in the built environment, are a minority group facing hurdles that majority groups need not reckon with. In contrast, in Russia, inaccess stories—although frequently about ableism—are also frequently about corruption leading to broader infrastructural failure. In this way, inaccess stories in Russia, like the interspersing of disability access with other infrastructural problems in the #SochiProblems meme, act as assimilationist rhetoric rather than special-minority group discrimination built on liberal democratic legal principles. At the same time, elements of material design that are intended to facilitate disability access sometimes circulate in Russia independent of disabled people's own advocacy.
Forness: Generating Inaccessible Accessibility
The #SochiProblems example drives home a question that kept coming up as I considered the inaccess stories that I heard in Petrozavodsk: What is a ramp for? As Sarah Ahmed (2019) asserts in her treatise on the concept of use and usefulness, the very being of an object in relation to humans suggest a question of what it might be used for, a purpose, which she glosses as forness (the forness of an object).8 Ahmed explains: “In treating usability as communication, we would be thinking not only of whether it is obvious how to use something but who can use something” (2019, 59). The semantic address of the ramp as an architectural form communicates something to passersby, a digital representation communicates something to the viewer (or ALT text reader). Moving in friction, the notion of inclusion is abstracted into attributes of liberal modernity. The forness of a ramp at a building's entrance suggests that the ramp ought to be a purveyor of access. The meaning of the access and inclusion, however, and the material coming-to-be of ramps in the built environment move in friction. The friction between these two kinds of forness, function (access) and form (semantic address), generates a proliferation of both images of inaccess and actual in inaccess. The journalist's video feature appeared to be “about” injustice for disabled people, and yet, it did not incorporate any disability expertise, and it imagined a nondisabled public audience, mobilizing the semantic meaning of inaccess to suggest a broader political critique.
The nonfunctional ramp fails as a tool for accessibility for wheelchair users or other members of the malomobil’nye gruppy (those with strollers, children, the elderly and others with poor balance or compromised mobility). It is functional, however, as a symbolic element of the visual public sphere. The ramp, as a cultural icon, references access and social democracy as well as aesthetics of European society. A ramp is not just a requirement of meeting building standards (after all, with the right kind of bribes and lack of oversight, these might be overlooked altogether): it is a vessel for a particular kind of cultural flagging. This is a place of modernity that the ramp is imagined to indicate. A ramp carries with it the mark of modernity, a standardization of the built environment, that, through the logic of checklists and norms, bit by bit, overtakes local vernaculars.
Checkmark ramps continue to spring up, as they are implemented by architectural firms in new constructions or executed by workers following orders. Anya's insight that by establishing a norm, a process also establishes a de facto minimum level of satisfactory execution, begins to circulate in interesting ways, as we watch the manipulation of “minimum” come into negotiation between different parties with different interests. A norm operates as a necessary and useful tool of modernity—offering the possibility of sharing potential measurements for a well-functioning ramp between different locales. Yet, the establishment of a norm also creates a fundamental situation of friction by decoupling the design process from function. From the perspective of centralized planning, the shortcut of creating a checklist or instructions prevents the kind of mistakes that vernacular architecture might make, or the replication of a costly design process through trial and error, assessing the properties of various materials and measurements. By centralizing expertise, however, the checklist prevents fellow citizens from recognizing that knowledge of what counts as a working accessibility ramp can be found in the ramp users. The check mark reveals itself as fundamentally belonging to systems of centralized, hierarchical design and planning. Materials and energy may actually be wasted when checklists are incorrectly interpreted, elements are left off to save on costs, or design elements are added without integrating them fully with the overall environment. The checkmark ramp appears where universal design travels in friction. The form of the ramp implies the invisible presence of the checklist, and the power relations facilitate the execution of the checklist's guidelines.
In this way, we might return to Rudak's (ultimately untrue) comment that ramps most likely came to Russia not as individual elements, but rather as part of plans for shopping malls that were imported wholesale from Europe. The logic of this statement underscores his certainty that accessibility ramps, as an element of material design, were patently not Russian in origin. That is, the concept was one that had been imported, and moreover, the import of the accessibility ramp was something that traveled into Russian infrastructures not as an independent unit, or as a design element actually intended to facilitate the access of minority populations, but rather as part of a larger imported infrastructure.
Instead of being part of the plans for a specific building, the concept of the accessibility ramp is continually being imported to Russia through distributed professional expertise and as an semantic concept that conveys a longed-for modernity. The ramp as a technology, and the checklist of architectural accommodations for malomobil’nye gruppy, travels within Russia as part of an infrastructure of illiberal democracy, which, on the one hand, reconsolidates centralized power of in an autocratic, modernist state, and on the other hand, privileges profit-making and economic growth in private industry as an end to itself, as the social good from which other social goods might follow. In this mode of logic, ramps are built in the most symbolically important government buildings as a way to play lip service to internationally disseminated democratic principles of human rights and minority inclusion: In this incarnation, the ramp symbolizes the egalitarian access to the tools of governance that characterizes democracy in the global imaginary. In shopping malls, the ramps play into an aesthetic of access that has to do with luxury, comfort, and ease, with technology and Europeanness. That is, these ramps are tied up in a global politics of development, wherein a symbolic inclusion of minority groups is not an end in itself, but rather is leverage toward entrance or membership in Western systems of governance that privilege minority inclusion as a precept of modernity. The aesthetic work of the ramp as evidence of dissemination of these varied value systems appeals to a heterogeneous array of stakeholders—most of whom are not members of the malomobil’nye. This pattern of proliferation works in friction with the purported forness of accessible design, and the actual needs of actually disabled people.
Tracing Inaccessible Accessibility Ramps in Global Friction
When worlds are built and rebuilt, when norms travel, power and exclusion are built in. Power relations do not operate as nested binaries of exclusion or domination: Russia/West, able/disabled. Rather, valences of power move through, across, and with one another, producing frictions that propel unexpected relationships or objects, such as the inaccessible accessibility ramp, into existence and prominence. Standards and norms—elements of design or infrastructure, and their implementation—are always already engaged in an ontological presupposition about what kinds of human bodies count.
In this chapter, I picked up the story of an inaccessible built environment in the public spaces of the city of Petrozavodsk outlined in the introduction to this book. I explored how ramps and stories about ramps—narrative and visual—proliferate in friction. Inaccess stories based in disability expertise as well as inaccess stories that mobilize the concept of the failures of accessible design to raise broader political critique without input from disabled people both contribute to this generative friction. In the next chapter, thinking with Anya's observation that public buildings are renovated for access before disabled peoples’ homes, we turn to a consideration of access and inaccess in domestic spaces.