Canal Inaccesible

Winner of Prix Ars Electronica 2006

How can new media be used to improve the world we live in? 40 people with disabilities use mobile phones to photograph every obstacle they come across on the city's streets. By means of multimedia messages they create a map of inaccessible Barcelona on the internet.

The result is a map of Barcelona’s inaccessibility for those confined to wheelchairs, a cartographic representation of the parts of town that are closed to people with handicaps. In this way, 3,336 architectural barriers and stumbling blocks have been documented on canal*ACCESSIBLE since December 2005—thus, empowerment of disadvantaged segments of the population as something other than empty phrases for once.