Living Inclusion Café Recap
As part of UN-HABITAT’s Urban October, this LIN’s autumn Inclusion Café on 9 October 2025 welcomed around 50 participants to discuss inclusive cities. To build truly inclusive and resilient urban areas, disability inclusion must be at the centre of urban development. We asked: What does this mean in practice, and how can it be implemented effectively? What aspects might we overlook when designing accessible cities?
To gain an impression of the participants’ thoughts, we began the event with a check-in where we asked participants for their immediate associations with “cities”. Their responses generated this Word Cloud image:
Highlights from the Panel Discussion
The session began with a panel discussion featuring leading voices in disability-inclusive urban development:
Dr Ola AbualGhaib, Director of the Secretariat at the UN Global Disability Fund, introduced the Resilient and Inclusive Cities Hub (RICH) Initiative, launched earlier this year at the Global Disability Summit. She emphasised the initiative’s multi-stakeholder approach to learning from one another, while also supporting cities in taking concrete actions across the three pillars of infrastructure, generalisation of services and systems, and inclusive service delivery. With seed funding from Germany, RICH has already attracted over 600 innovative city-focused proposals, showing the growing global appetite for inclusive transformation.
Federico Batista Poitier, Manager of Policies and Programmes at United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) based in Barcelona highlighted how cities can collaborate with Organisations of Persons with Disabilities (OPDs) to ensure accessibility and accountability, stressing the need for a more participatory governance model and building trust with persons with disabilities and the community at local level by taking the time to provide the means (e.g. reasonable accommodation) for persons with disabilities and their local communities to engage.
Mikaela Patrick, Head of Research and Delivery at the Global Disability Innovation Hub, led global research on inclusive cities, with the report published this year. She talked about areas within inclusive cities that are often overlooked. She highlighted the importance of culture and of considering the social aspects of cities as key to addressing stigmatisation and fostering a sense of inclusion and belonging. She also pointed to the need to give more attention to other, sometimes more invisible impairment types beyond physical mobility and to consider, for example, neurodiversity and intersectionality more broadly, e.g., in the context of informal settlements.
Highlights from Breakout Sessions
In Breakout room 1, Marcie Roth, CEO of the World Institute on Disability (WID) in the USA, talked about city-specific disaster risk reduction (DRR) strategies while centring the leadership of disability-led organisations (DLOs) and disabled activists.
Breakout room 2 welcomed Annamae Muldowney, Inclusive Design Researcher at the GDI Hub, UK, to discuss culture, recreation, and green spaces. She highlighted examples from the Global Action Report that reflected different barriers and interventions to address not only obvious physical barriers but also attitudinal barriers, and the understanding around, for example, sensory-friendly spaces for neurodiverse persons.
Laura González Muñoz, Advisor to the City Manager in Barranquilla, Colombia, presented InclúyeTE+, the city’s official care system for persons with disabilities and care workers, in Breakout room 3. She outlined that this system is based on a door-to-door survey of 35,000 people and regular consultation processes, including persons with disabilities. InclúyeTE+ focuses on autonomy, independent living, productive social participation, and equitable care of persons with disabilities and carers.
A key message across all sessions was the engagement with and of persons with disabilities in urban design to ensure that priorities and key issues are not determined solely by persons without disabilities, and that persons with disabilities have access to everything a city has to offer.
We thank all speakers for their time and expertise, and all participants for their thoughts and contributions.
Further Resources
Access all recordings from the Living Inclusion Café.