Abstract
This article presents the first sustained engagement with DeafSpace within urban planning theory. While DeafSpace—a design framework formally developed at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., in 2005—has influenced architectural design by centering Deaf cultural practices and visual-tactile communication, its broader urban implications remain unexplored in the literature. We reposition DeafSpace as a radical planning imaginary challenging phonocentric norms and technocratic regimes. Drawing predominantly on disability and Crip theory, we theorize DeafSpace as a transgressive praxis grounded in interdependence, care, and spatial agency. We offer a set of provisional recommendations for planners, not as a comprehensive blueprint, but as an opening toward reimagining the normative foundations of planning which DeafSpace unsettles. Finally, we conclude with thoughts on the future of DeafSpace research in urban planning, emphasizing the necessity to attend to the Global South and its growing Deaf community.
Urban planning is not merely about shaping the built environment. It also structures who belongs, how people interact, and what forms of cultural expression are legitimized in public space. In contemporary practice, urban planners align themselves with policies aimed at reducing inequality and promoting social inclusion (American Planning Association, 2021). They are tasked with creating more efficient and equitable cities, addressing issues such as environmental sustainability, mitigating the harm caused by gentrification, and fostering democratic engagement to ensure meaningful economic growth for all communities. This balancing act frequently places planners in the position of mediating between governmental bureaucracy and the residents they serve. While architects are becoming increasingly familiar with the design principles of DeafSpace 1 to accommodate the spatial and sensory needs of Deaf individuals at the scale of buildings, urban planners have yet to integrate DeafSpace insights into broader projects of city planning. However, before these DeafSpace design principles can be meaningfully applied, urban planners need a guiding theoretical framework to expose and challenge normative spatial practices—often defined through legal, architectural, and capitalist market logics—that produce disabling environments for deaf people in the first place. This paper bridges DeafSpace and urban planning theory by engaging Crip and disability theories, advocating worldmaking strategies that foreground a transformation of planning practice and the politics of belonging for Deaf people.
By “DeafSpace” as one word, we refer to the constellation of architectural, cultural, and political practices through which Deaf people interrogate and interpret space, often shaping and claiming space to foster visual-tactile-kinesthetic communication and deaf ways of being (i.e., using signed languages and navigating space as a deaf/disabled person). Much of this is informed by deaf space (two words) and deaf geographies, wherein existing studies have explored the phenomenon of deaf people occupying space, emphasizing sensory experience and cultural belonging as they convene and create networks and communities (Friedner and Kusters, 2015; Gulliver, 2015; Gulliver and Kitzel, 2016; Modern, 2024; Solvang and Haualand, 2013). Embedded in this Deaf epistemology, our contribution lies in extending DeafSpace to the scale of urban planning—treating it not simply as a design paradigm, but as a transgressive political project that contests and disrupts phonocentric and technocratic orders.
By its very nature, DeafSpace is multiscalar: it begins with the corporeal experience of the environment in a deaf body, which informs the structuring of spaces to enhance visual-tactile-kinesthetic communication and sensory experience. This becomes a cultural and political practice of spatial customization that unfolds at the scales of the neighborhood and city, but here, DeafSpace remains an unfulfilled urban imaginary, representing both historical aspirations and contemporary struggles for Deaf placemaking. Theorizing DeafSpace within urban planning allows us to move deaf inclusion in the planning field beyond an accessibility framework, which treats deaf people as a disabled population to be accommodated (as required by the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and 2008), toward a political project advancing deaf people’s survival, belonging, and influence over the spaces that they inhabit. The DeafSpace project rejects deafness as a deficit and affirms that deaf experiences and epistemologies are generative for broader city-building.
The contemporary city remains structured around phonocentric norms designed for auditory communication and privileging spoken language. As long as they are accepted as norms, the barriers that Deaf people experience do not often highlight their linguistic and cultural minority status, but as them being disabled first. Consequently, Deaf 2 people are rarely considered as cultural producers or active shapers of the city. Instead, urban planning relegates them to the realm of disability access codes and consumer accommodations, failing to account for their distinct ways of being in space. Without critical intervention, Deaf people remain passive recipients of design rather than world-builders challenging and reimagining urban life. Despite nominal efforts of urban planners to be inclusive, deaf residents often face significant barriers to participating in urban planning processes as communication barriers exclude deaf individuals from critical decision-making impacting their communities (Harold, 2013; Terashima and Clark, 2021). While many deaf people gravitate toward specific metropolitan areas due to better access to education and employment opportunities, they are not typically concentrated in a single neighborhood or geographic area in the way racial or ethnic groups might be. Instead, Deaf communities tend to form cultural and social clusters around sharing experiences and interests, much like how queer communities gather near cultural hubs (Behm, 2019). Further, the absence of deaf perspectives in planning reflects a broader trend: despite growing interest in equity and inclusion, disability perspectives remain markedly underrepresented in urban planning theory and practice (Terashima and Clark, 2021), limiting the field’s ability to engage with the full range of embodied and spatial experiences.
Bringing DeafSpace into urban planning also means engaging with the political economy of space. Design is not neutral. It is driven by policies, regulations, and market logics prioritizing profit-driven development over community needs. Gentrification, displacement, and the privatization of public space render it increasingly difficult for Deaf communities to maintain gathering places and cultural hubs. Without dedicated Deaf spaces, Deaf identity becomes precarious, and the long-standing practices of Deaf sociality, resistance, and knowledge production are eroded. Taken together, these conditions signal the need for an analytic capable of addressing not only exclusion but also the generative spatial practices through which Deaf people reshape the city.
We explore the recurrent concept of “transgression” in relevant selected literature to (re)situate DeafSpace in a radical tradition of thought. In so doing, we challenge dominant socio-spatial norms, emphasizing the transformative capacity of transgression as a spatial and political act. By transgression, we do not simply mean resistance or disruption, but a deliberate crossing of sensory, spatial, and normative boundaries that have historically excluded Deaf people from urban life. Following disability and Crip scholarship (Berne et al., 2018; Gissen, 2022; Hamraie, 2017; Imrie, 1996; Kafer, 2013; McRuer, 2006), in further dialogue with queer-feminist scholarship (Dean, 2011; Kirby, 2015; Muñoz, 2009) and insurgent planning scholarship (Huq, 2020; Miraftab, 2009, 2020; Sletto, 2023), we conceptualize transgression as an embodied and spatial practice—an affirmative act that exposes the limits of the normal and opens up alternative urban futures. DeafSpace, when scaled to the city, enacts transgression by refusing to be contained within technocratic access regimes, instead demanding a reconfiguration of what and who cities are for.
In what follows, we trace the historical emergence of DeafSpace, its limitations at the urban scale, and its radical potential as a tool for planning. The first section provides much-needed context for the development of the DeafSpace concept, which has been undeveloped in planning literature until now. We then elaborate upon the dearth of DeafSpace theorization and work in relation to its applicability at the urban scale. Next, we build the case that DeafSpace work at the urban scale must be embedded within a theoretical tradition emphasizing the notion of transgression and the disruption of normative modes of spatial practice which deaf bodies engender by virtue of their situatedness in an otherwise hearing world. We then offer a set of provisional recommendations for planners—not as a comprehensive blueprint—but as an opening toward reimagining the normative foundations of planning which DeafSpace unsettles. We conclude with thoughts on the future of DeafSpace research in urban planning, emphasizing the necessity to attend to the Global South and its growing Deaf community. Before theorizing DeafSpace as a planning concept, it is necessary to trace how it emerged, how it has been practiced, and why its urban implications remain undertheorized.
DeafSpace and its context
Deaf people have existed for as long as humanity itself, and since, they have modified environments to accommodate their visual-tactile-kinesthetic modes of being. Beyond these spatial adaptations, “DeafSpace” design emerges as a deliberate and politicized paradigm rooted in Deaf cultural identity. Rather than merely ensuring accessibility, DeafSpace reflects a broader assertion of agency over the shaping of spaces to affirm Deaf ways of being. This section introduces the origins of the DeafSpace project, its theoretical underpinnings, and the challenges faced by the Deaf community in establishing and maintaining spaces that reflect their cultural identities. DeafSpace, we show, is a multi-scalar project. It first emanates from and operates at the scale of the body, in that DeafSpace architectural design caters to the immediate environmental access needs of the deaf individual. It simultaneously operates at the scale of the politico-cultural, where the spatial customization contends with an unfulfilled urban imaginary, reflecting both realized and aspirational Deaf geographies.
The origins of DeafSpace at Gallaudet University
The DeafSpace project materialized in 2005 at Gallaudet University. Located in Washington, D.C., Gallaudet University is the world’s only federally chartered university for the education of deaf and hard-of-hearing students, founded in 1864 and serving an international student body. The DeafSpace project emerged there in preparation for the construction of a new academic building, and stakeholders sought to move beyond the minimal standard of “accessibility” toward spaces designed by and for Deaf people.
Although a campus for the deaf, nearly all of its buildings and grounds were designed by hearing architects, and as Findley (2005: 5) notes, “not having control of the space one is occupying is in some way demoralizing.” Many places on campus did not “fit” how deaf people would prefer to use spaces, not just in terms of access, but for cultural expression. Thus, embodying the popular disability rights motto: “Nothing About Us Without Us” (Charlton, 1998), Deaf people on Gallaudet’s campus desired more agency in how the buildings they used were designed. Indeed, in its foundational (but rudimentary) architectural context, Bauman defines DeafSpace as deaf people’s “daily acts of cultural customization focused toward building connection—visual, spatial, social, and symbolic” (Bauman, 2014: 377). In this affirming world, Deaf people are not marginalized in the spaces they occupy.
Thus, hearing architects adopted a more human-centered design approach and handed over the “pen” to deaf stakeholders, co-creating this academic building, now called The Sorenson Language and Communication Center. Out of this collaborative process of exploring how deaf people experience their environment and how design could nurture deaf ways of being and Deaf culture, the “DeafSpace Design Guidelines” were drafted. These design principles—amounting to over a hundred arranged in five categories, and still in development to date—uncover the “Deaf cultural aesthetics that are embodied in the built environment” (H-D. Bauman et al., 2010: 218). As these specific architectural features are indexed to how deaf people perceive and use space, architects are expected to develop a more empathetic approach—supposedly in a more “humane” way that taps into the “wisdom” of deaf people—to understand the relationship between bodies and environments, and how a culture could emerge from it (Bauman, 2010, 2014).
The DeafSpace Design Guidelines cite anthropologist Edward T. Hall, who writes, “[P]eople from different cultures not only speak different languages but, what is possibly more important, inhabit different sensory worlds” (Hall, 1966: 2). As a case in point, using sign language significantly alters how one uses and perceives space. One does not whisper into the ear of another person to share a private comment, but uses the body or objects in space to conceal what is signed from onlookers (assuming that people in the space know the signed language). Likewise, it is culturally unacceptable for a signer to be in dim lighting or to have an object obstructing their signs. Emphasizing a comparatively cultural angle than one concerned with disability, 3 Bauman (2010, 2014) and Bahan (2014) posit radical possibilities in exploring alternative sensory worlds through a Deaf cultural lens. “The belief that deaf cognitive, cultural, and creative sensibilities possess a latent potential for the making of a Deaf Architecture stands to have a profound impact on Deaf culture and the discipline of architecture” (Bauman, 2010: 12–13). Deaf culture here implies a community anchored by strong social connections between deaf people, shared signed language, life experiences, and cognitive sensibilities (Bauman, 2010, 2014). Further, Bahan (2014) discusses how people can have visual-tactile orientations or audio-vocal orientations shaped by the experiences of the body and cultural values. He shares multiple examples of conflicts, or “sensory politics,” where the dominant culture’s sensory norms are imposed to favor audio-vocal orientation over the visual-tactile. Navigating these oppressive environments, Bauman argues, deaf people have an “acute awareness of the built environment,” and with this knowledge they not only know how to create spaces of “belonging” for themselves, but also how to create more inclusive and sustainable places (Bauman, 2014: 378).
This sense of belonging is a critical element in Hansel Bauman’s development of DeafSpace at Gallaudet University. For planners and architects to foster a sense of belonging, they require an understanding of experiences, cross-cultural connections, and shared agency in the design and creation of spaces. This includes an understanding of power dynamics between architects—often hearing—and deaf clientele. Here, DeafSpace emerges as a cultural moment, a movement to affirm and advance Deaf identity in the built environment. “A DeafSpace is one in which Deaf culture, in all its diverse dimensions, can thrive through full access to communication and the unique cognitive, cultural, and creative dimensions of deaf experience are encouraged. 4 In short, DeafSpace is about physical and emotional wellbeing; it is a space where one’s own unique identity as a deaf person can be explored and nurtured” (Bauman, 2010: 10), or as Friedner and Kusters (2020) summarize: “the DeafSpace project is not concerned with disability or deaf ‘access’ but rather with deaf ‘being’; it is a moral project” (p. 37).
The challenges of Deaf identity and belonging
There are unique challenges in how Deaf identity and culture are nurtured. Approximately 90% of deaf individuals are born to hearing families and grow up geographically separated from other deaf people (Allen, 2007). While the impact this spatial distance has on identity development may resemble that of other disabled or queer groups, deaf people are further distinguished by their use of signed languages and their status as a linguistic minority—but even compared with other language groups, deaf people do not have a historic homeland (H-D. Bauman et al., 2010: 219). Congregational spaces—such as Deaf schools and clubs—are thus crucial not only for communication access (there are more than 300 signed languages worldwide) but for cultivating belonging and a shared sensory world in which deaf personhood is affirmed. 5 A “strong” Deaf identity entails resisting hegemonic norms about what counts as a “normal” body. Deaf identity is also inherently intersectional. Deaf people hold multiple, overlapping identities—race, class, gender—that generate tensions within the broader community (Padden, 2007). Even those from multigenerational Deaf families—who inherit cultural knowledge, language, networks, and shared histories of oppression—may experience friction with the deaf majority from hearing families. As Deaf Studies has increasingly recognized, this complexity requires spaces capable of sustaining layered belonging. For this reason, Gallaudet University is more than a higher-education institution; it is a one-of-a-kind space for Deaf culture to thrive, a revered repository of Deaf experiences and culture where “DeafSpace” could come to fruition beyond ideation. For many, Gallaudet University is the homeland for the Deaf community, albeit constrained by its geographical location, social influence, and university functions. Here, “home” embodies a place where Deaf identity is given the opportunity to thrive.
Gallaudet University has also been central to Deaf claims to space and cultural agency, exemplified by the Deaf President Now (DPN) protest in 1988. Asserting self-determination and empowerment, the protest demanded a deaf president lead a deaf university rather than a hearing one. It drew global attention, including from the federal government, and became a milestone in the disability rights movement leading up to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (the ADA). Paraphrasing Senator Tom Harkin, Congress passed more legislation supporting deaf rights in the five years following DPN than in the previous 216 years combined (Gallaudet University, n.d.a). DPN and Gallaudet’s institutional presence consolidated deaf people’s visibility as a disabled, linguistic-minority cultural group entitled to agency over the spaces they inhabit.
While indeed transformative, the caveat of such an accomplishment is that the Deaf community and their progress may also be boxed within Gallaudet University—their “home”—with Gallaudet University also claiming that they are the “beacon” of the Deaf community. In no way intending to undermine the important work Gallaudet does for the community around the world, this claim nevertheless raises the question of how cultural agency can transcend the university’s campus, moving into new spaces of representation and policy change. Across multiple scales—from the rural to the urban around the globe—the university’s campus cannot be the only repository of the intersectional identities and experiences of deaf people. How can deaf people leave “home” and venture into the world to make lives for themselves, and how might the world welcome them? The deaf diaspora’s experience of discord, of not belonging in a world which marginalizes them, 6 transcends the University grounds and demands more inclusive urban imaginaries to be struggled toward.
The persistence of a Deaf spatial imaginary
Representing desires of belonging, Deaf people have long dreamed of a homeland beyond residential schools and Gallaudet University. One early articulation came from Jacob Flournoy’s 19th-century proposal for a Deaf state (Krentz, 2000). Later, Douglas Bullard's 1986 novel Islay, the first Deaf American novel focused on Deaf culture, envisioned a Deaf-led state grounded in autonomy and planning. Yet, the protagonist’s quest for Deaf self-governance ends in psychological collapse, gesturing to the internal contradictions within Deaf community-building and the burdens of leadership. In the early 2000s, a real-world attempt surfaced with the proposed “deaf” town of Laurent, South Dakota, but it ultimately failed due to funding shortages and its remote rural location (Willard, n.d.). Still, the most iconic spatial imaginary among Deaf people is historical: the town of Chilmark on Martha’s Vineyard in the 18th Century, where a high prevalence of deafness led to widespread use of Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language (Groce, 1985). Instead of autonomy, deaf people had agency, thanks to shared language access. This story, often recounted as paradise lost, reflects a romanticized longing not only for Deaf space but also belonging.
Deaf residential schools and clubs have been crucial spaces for cultural development and belonging. Though their numbers have declined, they remain powerful in collective memory. As Padden (2007) observes, Deaf clubs are seen as more “real” than contemporary, ephemeral spaces like Starbucks meetups. Yet, the ideal of a Deaf place today is challenged not only by gentrification and privatization, but also by internal changes in the Deaf community itself—shifts in class, education, and workforce participation that have stratified social networks. As Deaf people are increasingly dispersed and expected to navigate borrowed or temporary spaces (Kusters et al., 2024; Padden, 2007), the feeling of a unified, shared spatial home diminishes.
This nostalgia drives attempts to resurrect older Deaf spaces, but without adequate tools for unification or innovation, such efforts often falter. As Padden (2007: 15) notes, what is needed is not a return to the past but the capacity to generate new kinds of spaces reflective of today’s complex Deaf identities. While Deaf clubs were once divided along ethno-religious lines (Dunn and Anderson, 2020), today’s Deaf space must navigate intersectionality more intentionally. Despite these shifts, the visual-tactile culture and shared sensory experiences of Deaf people continue to generate longing for place—a longing not only for safety and community, but for spatial autonomy in a world designed around hearing norms. As we argue here, planning can play a key role in this cultural-linguistic revitalization—but only if Deaf people are empowered not merely as users of space, but as co-creators of it.
DeafSpace and the ethics of survival
Finally, transforming the state of the Deaf community brings to bear ethical questions Deaf studies and disability studies scholars face, e.g., why should deaf people continue to exist? (H-D. Bauman et al., 2010). If deaf people could be cured or deaf genes modified, would it not be easier on everyone? 7 Such enticing and pervasive claims advocating assimilation and normalcy often supersede arguments for creating Deaf spaces. Idealizing Deaf spaces (also “Deaf worlds,” “Deaf towns”) may evoke archaic imagery of segregation and asylums where Deaf people were sent away from their families and shut away from society (Mansfield, 2017), and in many cases, also abused. This pigeonholing has forced deaf people to make arguments concerning their intrinsic and extrinsic value to prove they are deserving of survival.
This burden has forced deaf people to consider how they might emerge from “isolation” 8 and advance their contributive worth to society. Ethically, Deaf people’s language and culture—largely resulting from sharing space and resisting normalization in institutions—should be preserved because they are as valid as other cultures and languages (Burke, 2006). However, in Deaf people’s struggle to show how Deaf experiences and languages might advance humanity’s “greater good” (Bauman et al., 2010: 215), Deaf people repeatedly expose that the primary cause of their isolation is the construction of phonocentric normalcy perpetuated by society at large, and which continues to devalue deaf bodies. 9 Here, our interpretation of DeafSpace converges with international Deaf geographies that have conceptualized the “ethics of deaf existence” as a global and political question. Gulliver (2015) traces how Deaf spaces in France and across Europe historically embodied resistance to medicalization and cure, while Solvang and Haualand (2013) interpret Deaf space as a collective, Deaf-centered approach to not only communication access, but also conceptualizing what it means to be Deaf or disabled or both. Together, these works underscore that the survival of Deaf culture is spatialized—sustained through the material and social environments that allow Deaf life to flourish.
In spaces where deafness is normalized, we can accept the emerging concept of “Deaf Gain” (H.-D. Bauman and Murray, 2014; Williamson and Lynch, 2023), which reframes deafness not as “hearing loss” but as a source of social and cultural innovation. It argues that moving from devaluing to valuing deafness as a natural dimension of human diversity requires rethinking how an ostensibly “isolated” group is, in fact, integral to our shared ecosystem. Thus, the extrinsic value in the creation of DeafSpace is the disruption of the phonocentric hold of built environments and societies that limit how people experience space. A dedicated DeafSpace incubates other sensory ways of being in the world, and in so doing, reveals how society might change. This dialectical exchange of transforming society and space, the evolution of Deaf identity, culture, and community, is both expected and necessary—a microcosm of the changes required of broader society.
The DeafSpace lacuna at the urban scale
Building on this ethical and cultural foundation, we now turn to how DeafSpace—or, more precisely, its absence—appears within urban planning and policy frameworks. While multiple Deaf architects continue to apply DeafSpace principles to buildings, landscapes, and public spaces—such as Jeffrey Mansfield’s work with Black DeafSpace at Gallaudet (Mansfield, 2023) and Alexa Vaughn’s expansion into landscape architecture through “DeafScape” (Vaughn, 2018)—the limited urban planning frameworks for deaf people and meager urban planning scholarly engagement with Deaf and Disability Studies has left DeafSpace largely within the purview of private clients. With rare exceptions, planners have not considered what it means for Deaf residents to shape urban life as cultural producers. 10 Instead, Deaf people are typically cast as disabled consumers requiring access accommodations (e.g., festivals, public events), reinforcing their role as peripheral participants rather than co-creators of urban identity. Historically, disability inclusion in planning policy and practice has been defined primarily through legal frameworks of access and functional design standards, rather than through considerations of cultural or spatial agency and belonging.
Likewise, while the streetscape guidelines for the Union Market District in Washington, D.C. (D.C. Department of Transportation, 2017) are a remarkable precedent in explicitly including DeafSpace on an urban scale—particularly its specific design elements, such as textured edges and seating areas that foster visual communication—the planning document is limited in that it locates the problem of accessibility as a functional one to be addressed through design. 11 Understandably so, even the function of this document from the D.C. Planning Office is limited only to streetscape design, and within the several blocks of the historic industrial neighborhood bordering Gallaudet. While the document tells the developers and the Department of Transportation—who must comply with the design guidelines—that they are paying homage to its neighboring deaf population and designing for equity, they may, in fact, miss the political underpinnings of the DeafSpace project in advancing how Deaf people survive/thrive in urban environments. Yes, Deaf people may immensely appreciate the inclusion of DeafSpace design aesthetics and frequent the shops that front these streets, but the study of the relationship between space and agency remains limited by the centrality of placemaking and the access to businesses to spur economic development. How, then, does the planning office meaningfully advance Deaf culture, agency, or their ways of being? Considering the aims of the DeafSpace project, the relegating of DeafSpace to textured edges and curated sightlines in this planning document exposes the DeafSpace lacuna at the urban scale more so than filling it.
Yet, importantly, it must be acknowledged that in its comprehensive strategy for bolstering the city’s community and cultural landscapes, the 2019 D.C. Cultural Plan by the D.C. Office of Planning begins to move away from conceptualizing Deaf culture as an amenity (something static and to be consumed) and toward conceptualizing Deaf culture as a driver of urban change and a tool for equity building. The plan contains a full page dedicated to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community—validating them as a “major influencer of the District’s cultural identity” (D.C. Office of Planning, 2019: 98)—and novelly poses the question of how to better connect Deaf culture with the city at large as a foundational tenet (D.C. Office of Planning, 2019; Behm, 2019). No other planning document addresses the inclusion of the Deaf community beyond providing basic access already required by law (Behm, 2019). Indeed, most planning documents engage Deafness only in terms of minimal legal compliance.
Understanding the spatial context of DeafSpace at the scale of urban planning and policy also exposes a more fundamental problem: the dominant frameworks through which deaf spatiality is understood remain deeply invested in access, accommodation, and inclusion—terms often shaped by legal mandates, aesthetic conventions, and capitalist market logics (Behm, 2019; Imrie, 1996, 2014; Hamraie, 2017). As such, even progressive planning efforts tend to reproduce phonocentric and ableist logics (Harold, 2013), positioning Deaf people as beneficiaries of state-sanctioned generosity rather than agents of spatial production. This conceptual and political narrowing necessitates a turn to more radical imaginaries. In what follows, we argue that DeafSpace must be reframed not only as a design strategy but as a form of spatial transgression—one that challenges the normalization, surveillance, and commodification of deaf bodies and spaces. We position DeafSpace as a fundamentally political project: a site of resistance, rupture, and reimagination.
DeafSpace as transgression
DeafSpace and the state
Our critical engagement with the state in theorizing DeafSpace as a transgressive spatial practice is grounded in the historical and ongoing marginalization of Deaf people through state-sanctioned linguistic, cultural, and spatial control. Although sometimes acknowledged as a cultural-linguistic minority, Deaf communities have more typically been governed through logics of medicalization, where deafness is framed as a deficit requiring correction. We understand Deaf people as having been subjected to normalization processes aiming to assimilate rather than affirm their ways of being.
This is exemplified in the rise of oralist education 12 in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when signed languages were systematically banned and replaced with speech training. In these contexts, signing was rendered deviant, and Deaf children were subjected to disciplinary practices aimed at producing what Foucault (1995:138) terms “docile bodies”—regulated and reshaped to fit dominant norms (Baynton, 1996; Lane, 1984). While contemporary disability rights frameworks, including the ADA, have expanded physical access, they often perpetuate deficit-based models that prioritize accommodation over cultural recognition (Northrop, 2019). Implemented within logics of economic efficiency and technocratic compliance, such measures reinforce phonocentric spatial norms and treat Deaf people as passive recipients of inclusion rather than active spatial agents. Planning frameworks tend to incorporate accessibility in ways that align with neoliberal-capitalist development agendas (Imrie, 1996), rendering Deaf spatial needs secondary to market-driven priorities.
Superficial design elements such as visual alerts and captioning, while symbolically inclusive, often fail to address deeper spatial inequities. Public infrastructures remain predominantly phonocentric, limiting the capacity for Deaf cultural practices to flourish. As O’Brien (2020) argues in his studies of Deaf academic environments, even spaces that appear accessible may reproduce subtle forms of “audist geography,” where hearing norms structure who can be seen, heard, and included. These dynamics foreclose Deaf authorship over space and obscure the spatial imaginaries that Deaf communities have long cultivated—what we identify as DeafSpace. Acknowledgement of this marginalization impresses upon us the necessity for a radical reimagining of urban environments, a reimagining which repositions Deaf individuals as co-creators of space rather than passive recipients of state-designed accommodations, thereby challenging the pervasive influence of capitalist logics of accumulation and efficiency on urban life. It is for this reason that DeafSpace must be understood within a radical matrix, indeed, undertaken as a transgressive project seeking to assert Deaf agency over the production of space. We now turn toward an exploration of this radical, transgressive matrix.
Toward a transgressive matrix
At its most radical, DeafSpace is neither a technical intervention nor a style of inclusive design. It is a mode of spatial production that disrupts dominant planning logics at the levels of form, knowledge, and ontology. To theorize DeafSpace through transgression is to foreground its capacity to remake the spatial field from the standpoint of bodies, sensoria, and epistemologies historically excluded from urban planning. Transgression, as we deploy it here, does not signify mere deviance or disruption. It refers to a productive and situated refusal: a breach of normative spatial codes that simultaneously constructs alternatives. This is not a rejection of planning per se, but a contestation of its epistemic foundations—its sensory hierarchies, its professionalized gatekeeping, its allegiance to liberal inclusion without structural transformation. Transgression, in this frame, is not only a mode of critique but a method of reworlding, enacted from positionalities rendered marginal or illegible within the planning discipline.
In disability and Crip literature, transgression begins with the recognition that the exclusion of those whose bodily or social practices are deemed “out of place” (Kitchin, 1998) is not incidental but central to how space and citizenship are structured. As Cresswell (1996) argues, regulation operates to maintain the “purity” of space by identifying transgressions and reinforcing dominant meanings of place. In Habermas’ (1989) and Fraser’s (1990) formulations, the public sphere is understood as a voluntary space that depends on the capacity of private citizens to choose participation, with the option of retreating into the sanctuary of the home when necessary. This poses a challenge for many disabled people, who are often excluded from the “public” because their presence threatens the image of capitalism by exposing the lack of access (e.g., housing, accessible bathrooms). Yet, when disabled people become “involuntarily” visible in public space, they unsettle fragile ideals of citizenship predicated on autonomy, productivity, and voluntarism. In this way, the regulation of public space marginalizes disabled people not only materially but also symbolically, positioning them as threats to the notion of legitimate citizenship. As Imrie (2014: 13) highlights, spatial arrangements often function through a logic that separates people “by virtue of their bodily differences and variations in cognitive and physiological capabilities,” reflecting and reinforcing a normative ideal of the body. These ideals persist in contemporary welfare policy reform, where “self-active and self-starting individuals” are the basis of a good society (Imrie, 2014: 14). Urban planning thus revolves around the production of good citizens and, by extension, making bad citizens invisible. Addressing disability/deafness in urban planning, therefore, requires a fundamental challenge to prevailing assumptions about what constitutes good citizenship and a good society.
Disabled people are treated as second-class citizens not only through societal perceptions and interpretations of their bodies, but also through the ways rights are granted—or withheld—on the basis of impairment. Transforming the political standing of disabled people therefore requires (re)politicizing the body and citizenship “in ways whereby impairment becomes regarded as the normalcy of everyday life” (Imrie, 2014: 14). In short, as long as disabled people—or anyone else—are not recognized as full citizens and social justice remains unrealized, the potential of the city likewise remains unrealized. This argument parallels Holston’s (1998) concept of insurgent citizenship, in which transgression is understood as a political and spatial act of claiming authorship from below. Insurgency foregrounds the state’s active disablement of participation at the margins.
Miraftab (2009, 2020), Roy (2009), Yiftachel (2009), Huq (2020), and Sletto (2023) show how dominant planning regimes maintain control by formalizing space, defining legitimacy, and rendering unauthorized spatial practices as informal, illegal, or irrational. Yet, those excluded from planning often plan otherwise: insurgently producing space through informal infrastructure, knowledge sharing, collective improvisation, or extra-legal negotiation. Miraftab (2009, 2020) is the clearest in using the language of transgression outright, framing insurgent planning as a set of “transgressive practices” that deliberately trespass the boundaries of state-sanctioned participation. Transgression names the movement from “invited” to “invented” spaces of citizenship—an intentional stepping outside institutional channels to author alternative futures. By contrast, Roy (2009), Yiftachel (2009), Huq (2020), and Sletto (2023) describe transgressive dynamics without naming them as such. Their accounts of informality, gray spacing, and counter-planning trace how marginalized groups breach, rework, or variously circumvent the classificatory power of planning, exceeding legality, refusing professionalized authority, or improvising infrastructures the state fails to provide. Although these scholars do not explicitly frame such actions as “transgressions,” their analyses hinge on the same movements across normative spatial boundaries which Miraftab (2009, 2020) identifies directly. Our use of “transgression” therefore names the shared analytic thread across these accounts: i.e., practices that exceed sanctioned planning channels, assert subaltern spatial authority, and open new political horizons. Read this way, DeafSpace participates in the insurgent tradition not only through informal or extra-institutional spatial production, but through transgressive claims to expertise, legitimacy, and spatial authorship that unsettle planning’s epistemic foundations. While how citizenship and participation are constructed remains somewhat abstract, it should be clear by now that without reworking power and infrastructures, access to normative spaces is insufficient to attain genuine inclusion. Transgression signifies what lies within and outside of these structures, and what might be transformed.
In the design of spaces, transgressions mark how normative design standards encode able-bodied assumptions. Hamraie (2017) has shown how modernist architecture and universal design reproduce a narrow vision of the body: upright, visual, mobile, and efficient. These norms are naturalized in planning through technocratic access codes that treat disability as a deficit to be accommodated rather than a source of spatial knowledge. Crip theorists such as McRuer (2006), Kafer (2013), Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018), and Berne et al. (2018) instead foreground disability as a political and aesthetic orientation—one challenging neoliberal logics of autonomy and productivity via non-compliance, protest, and anti-assimilationist positions against “compulsory ablebodiedness” through elevating interdependence and care. As Hamraie and Fritsch (2019) propose in their Crip Technoscience Manifesto, these interdependence-based disability politics dismantle dominant forms of “knowing-making” for disabled people, transitioning to “world-building and world-dismantling practices by and with disabled people and communities that respond to intersectional systems of power, privilege, and oppression by working within and around them” (p. 4). Their work invites a shift from access-as-retrofit to access-as-worldmaking, a shift mirrored in DeafSpace. When Deaf communities design for wide sightlines, visual openness, or tactile communication, they do more than respond to exclusion; they build spaces centering relationality, mutual legibility, and non-auditory orientation. They thereby transgress the notion that planning begins with normative space and merely modifies it. Rather, planning itself must begin elsewhere. This orientation toward worldmaking further resonates with queer-feminist spatial theory, which similarly understands transgression as exceeding normative scripts of bodily comportment, temporal discipline, and urban productivity (Dean, 2011; Kirby, 2015). DeafSpace participates in this broader tradition of transgression through the visual and gestural poetics of signing in public, the spatial clustering of Deaf gatherings, and the reorientation of public space around sensory relation rather than auditory cue.
A vivid example of this transgressive public visibility may be observed during international Deaf mega-events such as Clin d’Oeil and the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD) Congress. These events do more than convene deaf individuals; they constitute temporary Deaf cities, producing what scholars have described as the “deafening” of public space (Kusters et al., 2024: 203; Solvang and Haualand, 2013). At the 2019 WFD Congress in Paris, for instance, deaf people from around the world congregated not only in formal conference venues but in nearby pubs, parks, and public squares, transforming everyday urban space into Deaf-majority zones. There, the “Canada Pub” functioned as an unofficial headquarters of Deaf sociability, where staff learned sign language and the landscape became reoriented toward Deaf sensory practices (Kusters et al., 2024). These spaces, while temporary, subvert the phononormative expectations of urban life—centering signing, visual cues, and Deaf cultural norms. These acts do not merely disrupt; they make new spatial grammars possible. Crucially, Muñoz’s (2009) identification of queerness as a horizon clarifies how transgression is not only oppositional, but aspirational. For Muñoz (2009), queerness is a “then and there” (p. 1), something not yet here—a structure of disidentification with the present that gestures toward other ways of being. DeafSpace likewise does not seek to be rendered legible within the current planning regime; it stages a refusal of the now, a call for alternative futures shaped by Deaf ways of knowing and inhabiting space. Transgression here is both a withdrawal from the phononormative urban present and a blueprint for collective “futurity” (Muñoz, 2009).
Transgression operates not as a refusal of space but as a method of spatial authorship. In DeafSpace, Deaf communities do not wait to be planned for; out of necessity, they organize and build spatial worlds through signing bodies, visual orientation, and communal choreography. They construct space not only against normative planning, but in ways that make planning intelligible anew. In the next section, we present a partial set of propositions that aim to open space for rethinking planning practice through the possibilities of DeafSpace.
Transgressive alternatives and implications for planners
To embrace DeafSpace as a transgressive planning praxis is to reject the idea that inclusion can be achieved through an accessibility checklist and technocratic compliance. Transgressive alternatives do not aim to “integrate” Deaf people into normative urban life, but to transform what counts as normative in the first place. In practice, as we reimagine power relations in planning, our methods and spatial interventions have grounding in Deaf epistemologies, sensory practices, and collective agency.
Rather than retrofitting participation to be accessible, planners should become comfortable reimagining design charrettes and public project evaluations centering Deaf experience as a generative force of spatial production. DeafSpace as a transgressive praxis heightens the need for a collaborative rationality and authentic dialogue to bring about intersectionality representative systemic change, one that disrupts the phonocentric “ideal speech situation.” 13 This means centering visual-tactile communication (e.g., American Sign Language, Protactile), hiring deaf-led design teams and consultants, and making planning fit Deaf ways of being—not the other way around. Of course, such reworlding might seem impossible, and while collaborative planners (Forester, 2009; Healey, 2006; Innes and Booher, 2018) have not critically adopted a disability lens in their arguments, they posit that social structures can be remade when differences are not flattened and engagement practices are tailored to the stakeholders. In this vein, DeafSpace compels the exploration of deaf knowledge, and urban planners can begin by creating spaces for Deaf agency and spatial authorship, not simply representation.
The inclusion of formalized DeafSpace design elements in the aforementioned Union Market Streetscape plan is an example of inclusionary representation, but not Deaf spatial authorship. In the limits of the plan itself and the superficiality of lionizing DeafSpace aesthetics, there is no meaningful redistribution of spatial power or cultural authorship. Such a dynamic calls to mind a suite of political strategies which deploy what might be understood as “inclusive exclusion”: a process by which difference is symbolically included while its radical demands are structurally neutralized (Ophir et al., 2009; Puar, 2018). When Deaf design principles are mobilized without a corresponding transformation in planning power relations, DeafSpace becomes decorous rather than disruptive; its radicality is displaced technocracy, which values sensory accessibility as a marketable feature and sidelines Deaf political agency. Situations like this precisely reveal the need for a critical DeafSpace praxis in urban planning—else, DeafSpace design may be readily co-opted under umbrella definitions of universal design, 14 or worse, “good architecture.”
To reduce this co-optive extraction, planners must contend with the ways in which collaboration and senses of belonging are interconnected. Urban planners must do their part in unpacking the complexity of how both deaf and hearing people belong in audio-vocal/visual-tactile realms. In the meantime, however, DeafSpace reminds us that Deaf people already have spaces where they belong. These marginal spaces transgress normative constructs, and paradoxically, planners must normalize these spaces to reveal broader worldmaking possibilities. Planners might think that having a visual-tactile design charrette is not representative of the “real world” because deaf people do not exist in their own autonomous neighborhoods or towns, but indeed, these charrettes reveal the liminal spaces of belonging and what is lacking in the “real world.” More importantly, it also manifests the real complexities within deaf communities and creates opportunities for authentic, agentive transformation of what it means to be deaf.
Conclusion
The preceding discussion has reframed DeafSpace as more than a design paradigm. It is a transgressive planning praxis that reconfigures how urban theory understands deafness, embodiment, and justice. As urban planners seek to integrate DeafSpace into their practice, they must confront a long-recognized tension at the heart of planning: the discipline’s entanglement with (neoliberal) capitalist logics and its simultaneous claim to serve marginalized communities (Foglesong, 2003; Stein, 2019; Kirk and Behm Josa, 2024). Professional planning operates via regulatory mechanisms, policy frameworks, and institutional structures which tend to normalize, codify, and manage difference rather than embrace the radical potential of transgressive spatial practices (Miraftab, 2009). In this context, the DeafSpace project is not a reductive matter of inclusive design defined solely by the DeafSpace Design Guidelines or a study of how deaf spaces are formed and what happens in them (with space understood merely as a stage on which things are enacted), but a challenge to the very epistemologies that undergird planning. The Deaf community, by virtue of its historical and ongoing marginalization, embodies a form of spatial and social deviance in a world that remains overwhelmingly phonocentric. This deviance is not incidental but structural—an unavoidable consequence of a society privileging the auditory over the visual-tactile, speech over sign, normative modes of communication over alternative ways of relating to one another and to space. The transgressive nature of DeafSpace, then, lies in its refusal to be merely accommodated within existing frameworks; instead, it demands a rethinking of urban spatiality itself. To take DeafSpace seriously at the urban scale is to recognize that deaf presence unsettles dominant spatial orders, introducing ways of being and moving that resist both the disciplining of bodies and the commodification of accessibility. This presents a profound challenge to urban planning as an institutionalized field.
DeafSpace forces planners to confront the limits of inclusion. Its insistence on transgression—of phonocentric norms, technocratic procedures, and capitalist spatial regimes—is not an act of rejection, but of reinvention. Planning that fails to welcome transgressive practices will reproduce the marginalization it claims to redress. Planning that embraces transgression, however, opens new pathways toward justice. If urban planning is to advance DeafSpace in ways that do not neutralize its transgressive potential, it must move beyond the language of access and accommodation and instead embrace planning as a site of contestation. This means recognizing deaf spatial practices not as deviations to be managed but as insurgent practices that challenge dominant urban orders. It also requires planners to critically interrogate their own positionality within structures of power and to collaborate with deaf communities in ways that foreground self-determination rather than top-down paternalism. So long as planning remains wedded to the logics of capitalist urbanism, the transgressive nature of DeafSpace will persist. But this persistence is also its strength: an ongoing challenge to phonocentric spatial norms and a reminder that urban space is always in flux, always contested, and always open to being reimagined in ways centering justice rather than mere inclusion. Thus, tethering DeafSpace to traditions of radical spatial praxis is a critical move in DeafSpace’s entrance into urban planning.
The planning discipline has long relied on normative tools—zoning ordinances, building codes, public consultations, and accessibility standards—as central mechanisms to achieve just urban outcomes. These tools, rooted in liberal-democratic and technocratic frameworks, profess marginalized populations’ inclusion within the built environment. However, these frameworks often embody epistemological assumptions and institutional practices reflective of Global North paradigms, limiting their applicability across diverse geographies (Miraftab, 2009, 2020; Roy, 2009; Watson, 2014). Our focus has been on cases in the U.S. and otherwise Global North, but DeafSpace is not confined to the Global North. Deaf communities across Adamorobe, Al-Sayyid, Kampala, Jakarta, Buenos Aires, and other cities are developing their own Deaf spatialities through improvisation and collective labor (Kusters, 2015; Kusters et al., 2024; Modern, 2024; Sandler et al., 2005). In many Global Southern cities, where formal planning institutions and infrastructure are often limited or exclusionary, Deaf spatial practices undoubtedly unfold beyond the reach of conventional regulatory frameworks. Future case studies must attend to these geographies, not only to correct the Global North bias in DeafSpace literature, but also to learn from how Deaf communities plan without planning institutions. These cases will be crucial for refining DeafSpace as a political framework capable of addressing the variegated spatial conditions in which Deaf life unfolds globally. Indeed, while Deaf studies has done much work documenting Deaf cultural identity and linguistic communities in Global North contexts, it has only recently begun to expand its focus to how Deaf people produce, inhabit, and manage space in the varied socio-political realities of the Global South (Bauman et al., 2010; Breivik, 2007; Kusters et al., 2024). Certainly, emerging considerations of DeafSpace and the city must take into account the rapid growth and urbanization of the Global South (Bongaarts, 2009; Randolph and Storper, 2023).
DeafSpace offers planners an opportunity to revisit the ethical and political foundations of their practice. As we have argued, transgression is not merely symbolic. It is material, mutineer, and generative. To take up DeafSpace meaningfully, planners must not simply “add Deaf people” to existing frameworks. Rather, they must collaborate in the creation of frameworks shaped by Deaf epistemologies, sensory orientations, and collective spatial agency. This requires much more than design guidelines or symbolic representation. As we have argued, it calls for deaf-led planning processes, the hiring of Deaf professionals and consultants, and the creation of institutional channels for Deaf spatial authorship. These practices are not ad hoc, but essential if DeafSpace is to be a catalyst for spatial justice in our cities.
Urban space is never neutral, and planning is never apolitical. DeafSpace, in insisting on the legitimacy of non-auditory spatial life, reorients planning around a different set of values—relationality, embodiment, and access as worldmaking. In so doing, it challenges the discipline to confront its complicity with the very structures it often seeks to reform. Yet, it also offers a path forward: one in which planning becomes a site of experimentation, co-production, and transgressive reimagination. In the persistence of DeafSpace lies a proposition—not just for more just cities, but for more expansive ways of knowing, relating, and planning otherwise.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to extend our gratitude to the editor, reviewers, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Kian Goh, and Josh Josa for their time and commitment to improving this work.
