Pineda, V.S. (2024) Inclusion and Belonging in Cities of Tomorrow: Governance and Access by Design. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.



Pineda transforms accessibility from a technical accommodation into a theory of urban agency. Radical inclusion names a condition in which physical, informational, legal, regulatory and attitudinal barriers are addressed at the level of systems rather than corrected after exclusion has already been produced. The book’s iconic move is to link disability justice to spatial justice: because social relations are spatially organised, exclusion is materially reproduced through streets, buildings, transport, information systems and planning procedures. Methodologically, Pineda combines disability studies, urban governance, universal design and policy analysis to argue that accessibility must enter project definition, institutional standards and participatory processes from the outset. Belonging therefore exceeds formal presence; it requires the capacity to participate, choose and influence. The wider bridge is to capability theory, design justice and rights-based urbanism, where environments are evaluated not only by what they contain but by the agency they distribute among differently situated bodies.