Hacking the Underground
Disability, Infrastructure, and London’s Public Transport System
November 2023.
"Minding the gap" while using a wheelchair on the London Underground goes beyond a sharp eye and careful foot placement to avoid a fall: it can entail carrying and deploying a portable ramp to embark and disembark or carefully mapping out a custom route ahead of time. The extensive infrastructure of London's public transportation system requires constant improvisation from users who move through the system differently than nondisabled people do. Centering the voices of disabled passengers, Hacking the Underground highlights how marginalized groups subvert and ultimately transform infrastructures, actively shaping them.
Raquel Velho draws on emancipatory action research in London, capturing the hegemonic character of infrastructures without losing the experiences and actions of marginalized users. Proposing a crip feminist and profoundly relational approach to infrastructure, Velho illustrates how the built environment holds the potential for both inclusionary and exclusionary world-building.
Advanced Praise for “Hacking the Underground”:
Beautifully written and remarkable in its conceptualization of infrastructure. Disability studies and science and technology studies have long needed a book exactly like this.
- Aimi Hamraie, author of Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability
Velho captures the texture of daily living in relation to public transportation (and lack thereof). Hacking the Underground will be of great interest to many, including disabled people, disability activists, allies, designers, planners, and organizers.
- Alison Kafer, author of Feminist, Queer, Crip
History of the Project
This book project was the result of my doctoral dissertation. From it, I am have published a series of articles (see 'Publications') as well as the book above. Below, I offer previous iterations of the project that may serve those going down similar paths as my own (dissertation to book).
Dissertation Abstract
Public transport in London is a massive infrastructure, with over 400km of underground tracks, a fleet of 8000 buses and a rich, 153-year history that has turned it into a symbol of the English capital. Despite its size, accessibility in this infrastructure has been a source of concern for wheelchair users in London. Based on interpretative analysis of thirty-four in-depth qualitative interviews with wheelchair users and policy-makers, observations of training courses and documentary data on London transport, this research asks, “How do wheelchair users use public transport in London?”
This thesis, which sits at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS) and disability studies, has two main arguments. The first contends that the barriers faced by wheelchair users in transport are the result of infrastructural stabilisation that occurred in a period of social segregation (1850s-1950s). This is discussed by intersecting the history of transport in London, with that of disabled people in British society, followed by interviewees’ accounts of the barriers they encounter in the infrastructure to this day. The second argument holds that, despite segregation, wheelchair users have taken an active role in the process of shaping transport in London. In this role, they have developed inclusion mechanisms on both micro- and macro-scales, through individual problem-solving on the one hand and collective and political activism on the other.
Drawing from STS concepts like the social shaping of technology and infrastructural invisibility, and engaging with the social model of disability from disability studies, this thesis shows the impact of marginalised users’ engagement. It concludes that the social perception of disabled users as ‘passive’ masks an active interaction with and shaping of the transport network. This thesis therefore provides insights into the paradoxical nature of infrastructure, showing places of agency where previously one saw passivity and exclusion.