Abstract

E-mapping technologies are a recent technological intervention promising to promote accessibility for disabled city residents. As part of their promise, they seem to position disabled people as agents, rather than as merely passive users of a city. Using Quill Kukla’s analysis of cities as “containers for agency,” I suggest that disabled people’s agency as city dwellers is often constrained in unnoticed ways that this technological intervention does not necessarily address. In particular, city life involves movement between different “stances,” or embodied modes of interaction with the environment. I discuss these constraints on spatial agency as enforcing “stances of justification,” pressures to explain or justify our presence, arising out of features of urban life. This analysis motivates new considerations in assessing whether technologies like e-mapping support accessibility and agency, framing our investigation in terms of whether an intervention allows users to take a wider range of stances.