David Gissen was treated for pediatric bone cancer in New York in the 1980s. He was nine years old. The treatment saved his life. It also left him an amputee — partially in a wheelchair and on crutches through his undergraduate architecture school years, navigating a profession that was not designed for him, studying a discipline that had not thought seriously about what his body meant for the buildings it was trained to produce.

He became an architect anyway. Then a curator. Then a professor at Parsons School of Design in New York, where he now teaches and writes at the intersection of architecture, urban history, and disability.

His book, The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes Beyond Access, does not argue that cities should have more ramps. It argues something more fundamental: that the way we have built cities — the history of architecture, the theory of urban design, the standards embedded in every building code — is built around a body that has never existed.

Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. Le Corbusier's Modulor. A six-foot, white, able-bodied male with idealized proportions — what disability scholars call the "normate template." Cities, Gissen argues, were not built for people. They were built for a mythological being. Everyone who doesn't match that template — which is, in one way or another, everyone — is disabled by the built environment.

Only 21% of New York City's subway stations are accessible to wheelchair users. That is not a compliance failure. It is, Gissen argues, the design logic made visible.

The Americans with Disabilities Act was supposed to change this. Passed in 1990, it is one of the most significant civil rights laws in American history. It covers more than 80 million Americans. Last week — on April 22, 2026 — the US Department of Justice delayed, again, the deadline for public institutions to make their digital services fully accessible. The ADA has been law for 35 years. Less than a quarter of New York's subway stations are fully accessible.

Gissen's argument is not that the law has failed. It is that the law asks the wrong question. Accessibility is not the goal. The goal is a city in which the range of human bodies is the design brief — not an afterthought, not a compliance checklist, not a accommodation for a minority.

Every person who has ever pushed a stroller, carried luggage, broken a leg, or grown old is a person who has been disabled by a city built for a body they temporarily or permanently do not have.

The disability is not in the person. It is in the building.

(Sources: Public Seminar / ACSA / Next City / NPR / Disability Scoop — 2023–2026)

Tokyo 🇯🇵 — Japan pioneered Universal Design as a formal urban philosophy. The concept — that environments should be usable by all people without adaptation — was developed and refined in Japan through a combination of aging demographics, Paralympic infrastructure investment, and the specific pressures of Tokyo's 2020 Olympic and Paralympic bid. Japan and the World Bank have co-organized formal programmes to export the Universal Design financing model to developing nations. Tokyo's train stations, pedestrian crossings, and public buildings have tactile guidance systems, audio announcements, and accessible platforms at levels that most other cities have not matched. And yet: Universal Design in Tokyo was built for the aging population first, and for wheelchair users as a secondary consideration. Gissen's critique still applies — the design brief was still a specific, narrow body. The philosophy expanded it. It did not abandon it.

London 🇬🇧 — The V&A's "Design and Disability" exhibition ran in London from June 2025 to February 2026 — the most prominent public exploration of what disabled, Deaf, and neurodivergent people have contributed to design and culture in a generation. The exhibition's argument was Gissen's argument made visible: disability is not a problem design solves. It is a condition design has produced, and a perspective design needs. London also has one of the world's most contested accessible transit debates: the Tube's accessibility retrofit programme has been running for decades, costs billions, and will not be complete until the 2030s. Less than a quarter of Tube stations are fully step-free. The city that produced the world's leading exhibition on disability and design cannot yet guarantee that a wheelchair user can get across it.

Singapore 🇸🇬 — Singapore has been cited by the Valuable 500 — a survey of 3,500 disabled people — as one of the ten most accessible cities in the world. The city-state's approach is characteristic: systematic, government-directed, measurable, and comprehensive. HDB estates are designed with barrier-free access as standard. Public spaces are planned with mobility in mind from the first design stage rather than retrofitted. What Singapore has built is close to what Gissen is arguing for — a design brief that includes the full range of human bodies rather than treating accessibility as an add-on. The gap between Singapore and New York's 21% subway accessibility is not a gap in knowledge or technology. It is a gap in governance will.