Cities Unlocked

We have endeavoured to understand the opportunities for Future Cities to be better designed for people with sight loss. We have undertaken a horizon scan of technologies and societal trends as well as running visioning workshops with city experts and people with sight loss to try to understand where the opportunities for innovation and change lie. Here you can find a number of insights on existing technologies, technologies in development and ideas for areas which should be given further attention.

We also identified key drivers of change which we think will directly or indirectly impact on how people with sight loss will move around cities in the future.

Access Over Ownership

From cloud computing to streaming media, car-sharing clubs to platforms such as Airbnb, consumers are increasingly favouring share agreement access to products and services over outright ownership.

Ageing In Place

Often unwilling to relocate from the homes in which they raised their families, many are keen to ‘age in place’, adapting the existing structures of their homes and immediate environments to more effectively meet their changing needs

City Power

With widespread devolution of decision-making to cities and local authorities and a strong localist agenda, city administrations may, in the coming years, be uniquely well placed to intervene on the behalf of the blind and partially sighted.

Citizen Power

As the concepts of crowdfunding and crowdsourcing become more familiar, individuals have access to a wider range of tools for coordination and organisation than ever before. This manifests both through heightened localism, new waves of network protest, postOccupy, and, more prosaically, in community organising and local lobbying and issue politics.

Smart City

Although visions for the ‘smart city’ are diverse and often competing they rely on a core tenant of increased automation through the use of big data with the aim of streamlining interaction and efficiency.

Changing Climate

For the blind, this disruption goes beyond inconvenience. Climate change will be the factor that has the most powerful and most lasting impact on our cities and we run the risk of making those incapable of adapting suffer the most.