A Breakdown of What the Award Means for Your Future Accessible Travel
As I browsed the many blog posts and articles that highlight accessible travel around the world, I became curious about a phrase I was seeing over and over: “winner of the EU’s Access City Award”.
In truth, I had never heard of the award before, although I thought that it was a smart step to give cities an award as an incentive to step up their accessibility criteria.
If you too are wondering what the criteria for this award is and which city won the 2021 Access City Award, keep reading on!
Background
The European Union began to take tangible steps towards prioritizing accessibility when they passed the European Disability Strategy in November 2010. One of the key actions outlined under the strategy was improving accessibility for people with disabilities.
The specifics of how to incorporate accessibility as a key action was left to the Employment, Social Affairs, and Inclusion sector of the EU. In 2010, the Access City Award was launched as a way to showcase cities that had gone above and beyond in incorporating inclusivity and accessibility in city planning: “the annual honor aims to award efforts to improve accessibility in the urban environment and to foster equal participation of people with disabilities”.
Which Cities Have Been Awarded?
The first winner of award was Avila, Spain, a city known for having accessible medieval walls as well as a long-term accessibility plan for public buildings and tourism.
The awards have since been nearly exclusively given to cities in Western Europe, with cities in the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden all selected over the past ten years. The only exception came in 2020, when Warsaw, Poland was selected on the basis of its commitment to accessibility in public spaces and buildings since the end of World War II.
Selection is based on several fields, including but not limited to built environment and public spaces, transportation, public facilities and services, and information and communication technologies.
Most of the winners over the years have an outstanding mix of several of the categories above, whether it be that all their transportation services are outfitted for people with disabilities, all their tourist spots are completely accessible with ramps, Braille, and recordings, or that the city has made large, tangible strides to become more accessible overall.
The most recent award went to the city of Jönköping, Sweden on the basis that the city leadership “made the city more accessible to persons with disabilities. Jönköping, in the south of Sweden, made continuous improvements in both the new and old areas of the city in collaboration with disability organizations. The city also created a local ‘Access City Award’, for businesses or organizations that worked with their customers to improve accessibility”.
As accessibility continues to grow as a priority for EU cities, I look forward to a day where there are five hundred plus city applications each year as opposed to fifty. As for now, it could be quite the fun travel itinerary to visit each of the eleven cities chosen for this award, if you have the travel bug like I do.
Written by Ryan Trombly
Ryan Trombly was diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy when she was eighteen months old. The disability causes right-side hemiparesis that affects the entire right side of her body, weakening her muscles and limiting her mobility in everyday activities. Despite this, Ryan has strived to live an independent life without any barriers and hopes to use her voice to advocate for the disability community.
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