Disabled City: Assessing the Level of Disability in City Neighborhoods (Case Study: Semnan City)

Human beings have been encountered with different kind of disabilities, inabilities, and restrictions. According to increase of population and urbanism, urban disability is one of the most challenging issues. Disabled city is a kind of city which is not proper for all the people in society and people could not be able to avail themselves of pathways, transportation, facilities and other things. In fact, the most crucial part of this problem is due to city and urban management. According to the World Health Organization and the World Bank, 15% of the world’s population live with some type of impairment or disability and according to predictions, almost one billion of urban will have had disabled dwellers by 2050 that 80 percent of them would live in developing countries and if we do not think about providing the desired urban life for these people from now on, we will increase the disability and inefficiency of cities and we will move away from urban justice. The purpose of this study is to identify and verify the indicators of measuring disability in the city and assess the disability of all neighborhoods of Semnan, which is considered with the assumption of more disability in the surrounding areas and less disability in the middle neighborhoods. The method of this research is descriptive-analytical. The required information was collected through documentary-library sources and questionnaire tools so that first by studying the available documents, the quality of urban life indicators of people with disabilities were extracted from various sources, then, the required information of different neighborhoods of the case study was collected through questionnaires distributed among people with disabilities. Then, this information was entered into SPSS software, which led to 6 factors to measure the degree of disability in the city. Moreover, the factors which led to the weakness of the neighborhood were identified. There are the factors which improve urban management in order to bring weakness into light and try to reduce and weaken them. Moreover, the neighborhoods need to be paid more attention, were shown as a map and the suggestions were made to reduce the disabilities of the cities.