scholarly journals Wheelchair accessibility to public buildings in the Kumasi metropolis, Ghana

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cosmos Yarfi ◽  
Evans Y.K. Ashigbi ◽  
Emmanuel K. Nakua

Background: Accessibility implies making public places accessible to every individual, irrespective of his or her disability or special need, ensuring the integration of the wheelchair user into the society and thereby granting them the capability of participating in activities of daily living and ensuring equality in daily life.Objective: This study was carried out to assess the accessibility of the physical infrastructures (public buildings) in the Kumasi metropolis to wheelchairs after the passage of the Ghanaian Disability Law (Act 716, 2006).Methods: Eighty-four public buildings housing education facilities, health facilities, ministries, departments and agencies, sports and recreation, religious groups and banks were assessed. The routes, entrances, height of steps, grade of ramps, sinks, entrance to washrooms, toilets, urinals, automated teller machines and tellers’ counters were measured and computed.Results: Out of a total of 84 buildings assessed, only 34 (40.5%) of the buildings, 52.3% of the entrances and 87.4% of the routes of the buildings were accessible to wheelchair users. A total of 25% (13 out of 52) of the public buildings with more than one floor were fitted with elevators to connect the different levels of floors.Conclusion: The results of this study show that public buildings in the Kumasi metropolis are not wheelchair accessible. An important observation made during this study was that there is an intention to improve accessibility when buildings are being constructed or renovated, but there are no laid down guidelines as how to make the buildings accessible for wheelchair users.

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-149
Author(s):  
Jan Siegemund

AbstractLibel played an important and extraordinary role in early modern conflict culture. The article discusses their functions and the way they were assessed in court. The case study illustrates argumentative spaces and different levels of normative references in libel trials in 16th century electoral Saxony. In 1569, Andreas Langener – in consequence of a long stagnating private conflict – posted several libels against the nobleman Tham Pflugk in different public places in the city of Dresden. Consequently, he was arrested and charged with ‘libelling’. Depending on the reference to conflicting social and legal norms, he had therefore been either threatened with corporal punishment including his execution, or rewarded with laudations. In this case, the act of libelling could be seen as slander, but also as a service to the community, which Langener had informed about potentially harmful transgression of norms. While the common good was the highest maxim, different and sometimes conflicting legally protected interests had to be discussed. The situational decision depended on whether the articulated charges where true and relevant for the public, on the invective language, and especially on the quality and size of the public sphere reached by the libel.


Author(s):  
Daniel Sperber

Around the central market forum area, every Roman town with pride and pretensions to importance developed a number of public buildings that made up a standard set, the components of which we can glean not only from the remains themselves but also from Vitruvius’ architectural treatise. In Book 5 he sets out “the arrangement of public places” (publicorum locorum dispositiones), listing almost exactly the buildings to be found in any Greek and Roman city: forum, basilica, treasury, prison and councilhouse, theater with adjoining porticoes, baths, palaestra, and harbor and shipyards. We have already discussed the prominent nature of the bathhouse, the palaestra is specifically admitted by Vitruvius not to be a usual thing in Italy, and harbors and shipyards are obviously dependent on specific geographic location. Of the other buildings, the treasury and prison, although necessary, were probably of minor importance and therefore do not merit much attention in the sources, while the council and senate-houses are expected features in a society in which a self administering community was the standard form of political life. The one building that stands out as peculiarly Roman is the basilica, a large covered hall that performed the functions of the ubiquitous stoas of Hellenistic architecture, and is obviously loosely related to them, but had a form that appears to lack any clear parallel in the Greek world. We shall discuss and describe some of these focal points of the urban center, beginning with the most prominent, the basilica. The basilica is often identified with the courts of justice. However, this identification is by no means clear. Indeed, it served either as a court of law and seat of the magistracy or as a place of meeting for merchants and men of business. These two uses were so mixed that it is not always easy to state which was the principal. The basilica at Fanum, of which Vitruvius was the architect (5.1.6-10), was entirely devoted to business, and the courts were held in a small building attached to it—the temple of Augustus. In Pompeii the basilica was situated next to the public granaries (horrea), indicating its commercial functions.


1996 ◽  
Vol 26 (11) ◽  
pp. 1246-1252 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. CUSTOVIC ◽  
R. GREEN ◽  
S. C. O. TAGGART ◽  
A. SMITH ◽  
C. A. C. PICKERING ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Francine May

Methods for studying the public places of libraries, including mental mapping, observation and patron mapping are reviewed. Reflections on the experience of adapting an observational technique for use in multiple different library spaces are shared. Sont passées en revue les méthodes pour étudier la place publique des bibliothèques, y compris les représentations mentales, l’observation et la catégorisation des usagers. L’auteure partage ses réflexions sur l’expérience d’adapter une technique d’observation à différents espaces de bibliothèque. ***Full paper in the Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science***


EMPIRISMA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Limas Dodi

According to Abdulaziz Sachedina, the main argument of religious pluralism in the Qur’an based on the relationship between private belief (personal) and public projection of Islam in society. By regarding to private faith, the Qur’an being noninterventionist (for example, all forms of human authority should not be disturb the inner beliefs of individuals). While the public projection of faith, the Qur’an attitude based on the principle of coexistence. There is the willingness of the dominant race provide the freedom for people of other faiths with their own rules. Rules could shape how to run their affairs and to live side by side with the Muslims. Thus, based on the principle that the people of Indonesia are Muslim majority, it should be a mirror of a societie’s recognizion, respects and execution of religious pluralism. Abdul Aziz Sachedina called for Muslims to rediscover the moral concerns of public Islam in peace. The call for peace seemed to indicate that the existence of increasingly weakened in the religious sense of the Muslims and hence need to be reaffi rmed. Sachedina also like to emphasize that the position of peace in Islam is parallel with a variety of other doctrines, such as: prayer, fasting, pilgrimage and so on. Sachedina also tried to show the argument that the common view among religious groups is only one religion and traditions of other false and worthless. “Antipluralist” argument comes amid the reality of human religious differences. Keywords: Theology, Pluralism, Abdulaziz Sachedina


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (29) ◽  
pp. 148-165
Author(s):  
طالب منعم حبيب الشمري ◽  
عبد الرزاق حسين حاجم

  The obelisk is a large stone block with a height ranging from 50 cm to 3 m. It varies in width from one obelisk to another. It is sculptured from one side or two or four sides with prominent picture inscriptions, often accompanied by cuneiform texts for immortalising kings and their military campaigns. This obelisk is constructed in a rectangular or square, and some of them a dome convex or semi-circular or pyramid. The lower section of the obelisks is wide, similar to the base of the base, and another section is sculpted on a slightly sloping end, so that it can easily be attached to the ground or placed on a special base. The rulers and kings of Mesopotamia established and displayed the obelisk in public places in order to be seen by the public.  It also was placed in the yards of temples or public squares and squares and the streets of cities. It used to celebrate their religious, military and historical achievements in order to immortalise their actions. These obelisks are held to commemorate the deeds of kings and their achievements in peace and war as confirmed by the cuneiform texts and the artistic scenes implemented on them.


Author(s):  
David Holland

This chapter considers the complex relationship between secularization and the emergence of new religious movements. Drawing from countervailing research, some of which insists that new religious movements abet secularizing processes and some of which sees these movements as disproving the secularization thesis, the chapter presents the relationship as inherently unstable. To the extent that new religious movements maintain a precarious balance of familiarity and foreignness—remaining familiar enough to stretch the definitional boundaries of religion—they contribute to secularization. However, new religious movements frequently lean to one side or other of that median, either promoting religious power in the public square by identifying with the interests of existing religious groups, or emphasizing their distinctiveness from these groups and thus provoking aggressive public action by the antagonized religious mainstream. This chapter centres on an illustrative case from Christian Science history.


Author(s):  
Ximena Alvial ◽  
Alejandra Rojas ◽  
Raúl Carrasco ◽  
Claudia Durán ◽  
Christian Fernández-Campusano

The Public Health Service in Chile consists of different levels of complexity and coverage depending on the severity and degree of specialization of the pathology to be treated. From primary to tertiary care, tertiary care is highly complex and has low coverage. This work focuses on an analysis of the public health system with emphasis on the healthcare network and tertiary care, whose objectives are designed to respond to the needs of each patient. A review of the literature and a field study of the problem of studying the perception of internal and external users is presented. This study intends to be a contribution in the detection of opportunities for the relevant actors and the processes involved through the performance of Triage. The main causes and limitations of the excessive use of emergency services in Chile are analyzed and concrete proposals are generated aiming to benefit clinical care in emergency services. Finally, improvements related to management are proposed and the main aspects are determined to improve decision-making in hospitals, which could be a contribution to public health policies.


2021 ◽  
pp. 147821032110320
Author(s):  
Ann Christin Eklund Nilsen ◽  
Ove Skarpenes

Histories of statistics and quantification have demonstrated that systems of statistical knowledge participate in the construction of the objects that are measured. However, the pace, purpose, and scope of quantification in state bureaucracy have expanded greatly over the past decades, fuelled by (neoliberal) societal trends that have given the social phenomenon of quantification a central place in political discussions and in the public sphere. This is particularly the case in the field of education. In this article, we ask what is at stake in state bureaucracy, professional practice, and individual pupils as quantification increasingly permeates the education field. We call for a theoretical renewal in order to understand quantification as a social phenomenon in education. We propose a sociology-of-knowledge approach to the phenomenon, drawing on different theoretical traditions in the sociology of knowledge in France (Alain Desrosières and Laurent Thévenot), England (Barry Barnes and Donald MacKenzie), and Canada (Ian Hacking), and argue that the ongoing quantification practice at different levels of the education system can be understood as cultural processes of self-fulfilling prophecies.


2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Jaffe

With relatively few exceptions, personal petitions from individuals have received much less attention from historians than those from groups in the public political sphere. In one sense, personal petitions adopted many of the same rhetorical strategies as those delivered by a group. However, they also offer unique insights into the quotidian relationship between the people and their rulers. This article examines surviving personal petitions to various administrators at different levels of government in western India during the decades surrounding the East India Company’s conquests. The analysis of these petitions helps to refine our understanding of the place of the new judicial system in the social world of early-nineteenth-century India, especially by illuminating the discourse of justice that petitioners brought to the presentation of their cases to their new governors. The conclusion of this article seeks to place the rhetoric of personal petitioning within the larger context of mass political petitioning in India during the early nineteenth century.


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