Making spaces in exclusionary places: the spatial tactics/stories of disabled people and their families in Hong Kong

This article reports on an exploratory qualitative research project conducted in Hong Kong. This investigated accounts of place-based exclusions, especially focusing upon the tactics disabled people and their families deploy to cope with exclusionary places and practice. I elaborate upon three thematic clusters emerging from group interviews. The first addresses place-oriented decision making. The second explores the emotional geographies that specific socio-spatial orders register and generate. Finally, I assess how far participants’ spatial tactics and stories may be regarded as either subversive or transformative. While participants’ practice often maintains disabling geographies, their spatial tactics also ‘speaks’ against congratulatory accounts of social inclusion. However, participants’ accounts of harrowing place-based discriminations register the extent and magnitude of barriers which combine to constitute the disabling conditions in which their spatial tactics/stories take place.

Points of interest

This article documents the place-based exclusions and discriminations disabled persons and their families routinely experience in Hong Kong.

This article explores the decisions participants made about where to go and not go; the feelings that they and others experienced in place; and the ways they tried to realise inclusive lives in places which often seemed to exclude them.

The disabled persons and their families who participated in this study experienced many strains and stresses in public places.

Participants also described their feelings, and those they try to bring about in others, in public places.

Participants not only cope with exclusions but also sometimes try to transform exclusionary places.