Strategy Of Building Barrier-Free Environments For Cities And Business-Decisions For Accessibility
From Paralympic Games – To Barrier-Free Russia October 4-5, 2012
Sochi is a resort city on the Black Sea coast of Russia and will be the host of the 2014 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. This beautiful city was the location of a two-day forum on creating barrier-free environments sponsored by the Sochi 2014 Organizing Committee and the Russian International Olympic University (RIOU). Sally Swanson exhibited the firm’s projects, highlighting SSA’s work on the winning Paralympics Bid Documents for Sochi and Universal Design guidelines for the PyongChang 2018 Winter Olympics/Paralympics. With more than 13 million disabled people in Russia, the Games provide the important goal of inclusiveness and a chance to improve the environment towards accessibility. The forum is hoped to encourage creating universal design principles, to introduce international standards and best practice to the participants, and to identify investment opportunities in creating barrier-free environments. That’s the vision and clearly there is still much to do towards its achievement. SSA continues to collaborate with interested cities on their bids and on creating an ‘accessible legacy’ in their countries.
