Disaffording the Pedestrian: When Affordances Are Removed

Designing for pedestrian road safety is challenging. Designs need to work for a broad and diverse range of pedestrians, while also considering the needs of other vulnerable road users, such as cyclists. Pedestrians are ranked as the most vulnerable in the road user hierarchy and designing for those with protected characteristics is critically important for road safety designers. One key challenge faced is designing the environment so that safety provisions can align with national and international goals to encourage people to walk or wheel more for health, economic and environmental reasons. Doctoral research was undertaken to understand whether and how design can improve pedestrian road safety and used key study sites in London to investigate the relationship between safety affordances in public space and pedestrian safety. One main finding was that often, during a redesign, safety features are removed. The consequences of these changes make it difficult for pedestrians to maintain their safety, particularly those with protected characteristics. Beyond potential physical harm, there are psychosocial impacts: people may avoid a route if they feel it is unsafe or leads to conflict in contested spaces which leaves pedestrians feeling unable to navigate a space confidently. These experiences are not routinely captured within road safety data, which focuses largely on KSI (killed or seriously injured) outcomes. I have coined this phenomenon of removing an affordance a disaffordance. The concept comes from over five years of doctoral research into pedestrian road safety in the UK, which focused on pedestrian-only study sites in London that had been redesigned as shared-space zones. Identifying safety affordances and disaffordances in the built environment helps to identify opportunities for broader and more systematic pedestrian participation in the design process. The research also developed GroundMap, a diagnostic approach for identifying and mapping affordances and disaffordances and anticipating the potential consequences of their removal. At a broader level, the term disaffordance might be extended to identify other environments where the removal of an affordance has significant consequences. While this research applies the concept specifically to pedestrian safety, its wider application across other environments and domains is identified here as a direction for future work.