The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has featured a ‘Muslims in Real Estate’ take on how equity and access are best shaped through design decisions, not post-occupancy fixes.
Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) writes:
Picture a hotel room designed for a wheelchair user. Red emergency cords hang from the ceiling. Grab rails bolted onto the walls as an afterthought. A sticker on the door announces: accessible room. The message, however unintentional, is clear: this space was designed for someone else, and you have been accommodated. Now picture the same room, redesigned from the outset with inclusion as a starting principle. Adjustable wardrobes, desks and minibars sit at considered heights. Discreet brass call buttons replace the red cords. A concealed ceiling hoist is tucked behind clean lines. Nothing announces the room’s accessibility – because it simply is accessible, without apology or aesthetic compromise.
This is precisely what guests will find when they arrive at Hotel Voco in Manchester. Designed with input from access and inclusion design consultancy Motionspot, the result was not just a better experience for guests with disabilities, but a better business case for accessibility. Hotel Voco generated an additional £217,000 in revenue from accessible suites and events in the hotel’s first full trading year and earned top industry accolades, including the Cateys Accessibility Award. The lesson is straightforward: inclusive design, when embedded at the concept stage, is not a cost. It is an investment.
Yet the architecture profession has been slow to internalise this understanding. Research from the Universiteit of Leuven in Belgium identifies a persistent gap not of intention, but of application. Architects may broadly support inclusive principles but lack the practical knowledge to embed them meaningfully into their process. A New Zealand study published in the Disability and Health Journal reinforced this, finding that architectural students, when placed in simulated disability situations and asked to navigate their own familiar campus, consistently identified barriers they had never previously noticed. Experiential learning – inhabiting another person’s reality, however briefly – changed their awareness as well as their design instincts.
This is where the concept of ‘universal design’, which was first introduced by architect and accessibility advocate Ron Mace in the 1980s, comes into the conversation. Defined as designing products and environments usable by all people throughout their lifespan without adaptation or specialised provision, universal design becomes not merely aspirational but procedural. Inclusion cannot be retrofitted. The ramp bolted onto the listed building entrance, the accessible toilet tucked behind the service corridor, the lift added as a planning condition – these are the architectural equivalents of an apology. As projects like Hotel Voco demonstrate, rather than adding a handrail, get the height right in the first place.
The Inclusive Design Overlay (IDO) to the RIBA Plan of Work provides architects with the framework to do exactly that by embedding inclusive considerations at every project stage, from brief to occupation. Its principles go well beyond physical accessibility, encompassing neurodivergence, cognitive and sensory needs, wayfinding, faith, gender and social belonging. Critically, it advocates for an Inclusive Design Lead on every project and for meaningful engagement with end users from the outset. It frames consultation not as a box-ticking exercise, but co-design as a genuine methodology.
Placemaking and regeneration: who benefits and who is left out?
In 2022, the Barbican Centre in London launched its Renewal programme; a long term project to conserve and upgrade one of Britain’s most significant Brutalist cultural landmarks. At its heart is a commitment to ‘design for all’, shaped by co-design, community engagement and public consultation. Respondents called for new lifts, automatic doors, accessible toilets, lowered counters and, crucially, language across the building that feels welcoming rather than merely compliant. In response, and in addition to access consultant input, the Barbican established an Access and Inclusive Design Advisory Group, including disabled artists and performers alongside experts in accessibility and inclusion, to guide detailed design throughout the next five-year phase of work.
This commitment to community-involved practice is also seen in the Barbican’s co-design process with Beyond the Box CIC, engaging future audiences aged between 18 to 30 years old. The Barbican’s approach reflects a broader shift in how we understand placemaking; not merely as the physical act of improving a space, but as a process through which communities define what that space should be. The MIT-affiliated Project for Public Spaces has long argued that the social goals of placemaking, such as building civic connections, increasing engagement, and advocating for the right to the city, are as central as the creation of beautiful parks and vibrant squares. The product matters less than the process.
But this process, when poorly executed, carries real risks. Critics have repeatedly observed that investments in shopping malls, bike lanes, waterfronts and cultural districts can function as amenities designed for affluent newcomers rather than long term residents, accelerating displacement and transforming authentic neighbourhoods into ‘lifestyle products’. It has been argued that community development organisations have gradually drifted from their social-movement roots into market-friendly strategies that can inadvertently fuel the very gentrification they seek to address. It calls instead for a ‘right to stay put’; an anti-displacement placement that positions residents not as recipients of regeneration, but as its authors.
The tension here is not new. But it sharpens around placemaking because of its symbolic weight; the promise of shared civic goods colliding with the reality of selective access. Equitable growth, then, at its core, means that residents grow alongside their community, instead of the community transforming around them. With the Barbican Centre sitting at the heart of an affluent housing estate, the test of its participative work on Renewal will be whether those who feel at home at the centre increasingly include a truly diverse mix of people from across London and beyond.
East West Rail’s approach to its new and upgraded station network offers one model for getting this right. The project recruited an Accessibility Advisory Panel of 12 people with lived experience of travelling with different types of disabilities, thought to be the first such panel to work with a design team at the outset of building a new railway. Their priorities, including step-free access, level boarding without assistance, accessible timetables, and removal of ticket barriers for disabled passengers, shaped the brief. Several members of the design team found their design assumptions fundamentally challenged – a reminder that designing with people, rather than for them, requires a willingness to have your certainties unsettled.
The architect’s role in shaping inclusive, resilient communities from the outset
Curb cuts, the sloped pavement edge introduced in the 1970s to allow wheelchair users to cross roads independently, have become a defining metaphor for the logic of inclusive design. This simple modification, made to include those once excluded, has improved everyone’s experience for the better. Parents with pushchairs, delivery workers, cyclists, and elderly pedestrians all benefited from a design intervention made with one group in mind. This is the curb cut effect: inclusion as infrastructure for universality. This principle can be scaled across the built environment. Automatic doors, captions on video, adjustable desks, quiet spaces in public buildings; each began as an accommodation for a specific need and became, in time, simply good design. The challenge for architects is to internalise this logic before the brief is set, not after the building is complete.
The Inclusive Design Overlay also makes the business case explicit, including:
- application in initial design stages saves retrofit costs further down the line
- it improves the end-user experience
- it produces stronger outcomes in the project’s business case
- This requires a shift in professional culture as much as professional practice. A study from the New Zealand Disability and Health Journal suggests that architects who have experienced – even briefly – the built environment from another person’s perspective design differently. The IDO calls for an Inclusive Design Lead on every project, which is being reflected in real-world projects. The Barbican has established a dedicated advisory group, and East West Rail have embedded its Accessibility Advisory Panel from day one. None of these approaches treats inclusion as a compliance condition, but as a design discipline.
Architect and Royal Gold Medal recipient Yasmeen Lari, whose participatory approach to community construction has shaped some of the most resilient post-disaster settlements in Pakistan, describes co-design as ‘creating a canvas with certain boundaries, then letting somebody else come and make it into a work of art.’ The architect does not relinquish authorship. But they learn to control only so far – and beyond that, to listen. For architects working in the UK today, this is not an outlying aspiration but a professional responsibility. Designing inclusive environments from the outset reduces project redundancy, keeps buildings compliant and sustainable for longer, and, as Hotel Voco demonstrates, can drive commercial as well as social value. More fundamentally, it reflects what the built environment is for: not to serve an imagined average user, but to welcome every person who walks through the door.
The question is not whether we can afford to design inclusively. It is whether we can afford not to. -Text by Muslims in Real Estate (MiRE) – a professional organisation elevating Muslims and allies in real estate and the built environment.
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