Collaborative Accessible-Space Mapping — Co-Designing Disability-Inclusive Cartography in Ibagué, Colombia

Between 2018 and 2020, the Disability, Affect and Cognition Research Group at Universidad Nacional Abierta y a Distancia (UNAD), working with psychology students, ran a mixed-methods participatory study in Ibagué, Colombia, that directly involved 30 people with sensorial and physical disabilities in co-designing a mobile collaborative-mapping application. Rather than a top-down accessibility audit, participants themselves identified and mapped accessible and inaccessible locations across the city, contributing their lived experience of navigating public space to a shared, crowdsourced cartography.

The study, published as "Physical and represented city: disability, spatial justice and social innovation" (Zenodo, 2020) and as a chapter in a Springer collection (2021), analysed the results through three lenses — accessibility, the social dimension of the city, and "resignification" of urban space by disabled residents — and frames the resulting app as a social-innovation mechanism for community inclusion and participation, distinct from researcher-led accessibility surveys.

As an academic pilot rather than a scaled public service, the practice has clear strengths — peer-reviewed methodology, a defined and disclosed sample, and direct participation by disabled co-researchers — and clear limits: no public evidence was found that the app was maintained, opened to Ibagué's wider population, or adopted by the municipal government after the study concluded, so sustainability and city-wide reach beyond the 30 participants remain unverified.

Read the full analysis: https://zenodo.org/records/4278344