The marginalized of Port of Spain

Photo 6 shows a disabled man being rejected by motorists in Duke Street , Port of Spain.

Marginalization

Many disabled people in Port of Spain are faced with the hardship of accessing certain spaces around the city. The photograph at Duke Street shows a disabled and probably homeless man having great difficulty to hire transportation for his next destination.  Unfortunately, disabled people are made up of a portion of those people who are generally marginalized in the city. People tend to ignore or even scorn such people in the city. This sort of marginalization has led to other social problems in the city.  For instance, inequality has heightened among people in the city because of the lack of attention paid towards the disadvantage. Moreover, it should be noted from a geographical contextualization that disabled people or bodies are also defined along the lines as one of a number of 'special populations', including the poor, the ill and homeless, which suffer the common social fact of 'disadvantage' (Golledge 1990).  According to Hall and Barrett (2012, 247), disabled bodies are physically excluded from some urban spaces and also the social pressures that make disabled bodies feel ‘out of place’ in some locations, for example, those of leisure, consumption and even education.

Situation such as marginalization or discrimination in the city could be reduced by ensuring that urban politics in all three realms such as the state, private business and community residents play an active role. Religious and social outreach groups are some of the most effective organizations of breaking the stigma that disabled people faced in the city.

References

Golledge, R. 1990. “Special Populations in Contemporary Urban Region.” In ‘A Geography for Disabled People’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, edited by Gleeson, B. J. Vol. 21, No. 2 (1996), 387-396. Accessed March 16, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/622488?origin=JSTOR-pdf.

Hall, Tim, and Heather Barrett. 2012. Urban Geography 4^th edition. London and New York: Routledge.