Cripping the City, Recylcart (2026)
Since Spring 2025, the elevator at Brussels Central Station has been out of service, making one of Belgium’s most important transport hubs inaccessible for many disabled people, yet public response has been strikingly absent. This project starts with a simple question: Why is there no public outrage? Drawing inspiration from disability justice thinkers — including Talila A. Lewis and their work on ableism as a system that values certain bodyminds over others — the Wheelies Collective will explore why allies stay silent, what accessible forms of protest can look like, and how lived experiences of exclusion can become collectively empathized with.
We will create a research and gathering space dedicated to crip anger, inspired by commercial “rage rooms” but reimagined through a disability justice lens as an accessible environment for collectively exploring, expressing and politicising anger about exclusion, ableism and inaccessible cities. Drawing on the feminist tradition of embodied rage — including its gendered and racialised dynamics, as articulated in recent work such as Sigrid Wallaert’s The Value of Feminist Rage — this project addresses the near‑absence of research on crip anger, a conceptual and political space we intend to claim and develop.
We will investigate historical and contemporary disability activism, including disability rights protests, direct action campaigns, creative protest forms, accessible manifestations, collective care practices within social movements. Through this, we wish to investigate: How have disabled communities transformed anger into collective action? Special attention will be given to forms of protest that do not rely on physically demanding marches, which are traditionally associated with taking up social and political causes but are not equally accessible to everyone. By looking at alternative forms of collective action, we aim to explore how public dissent can be organised around access, interdependence and care.
We will conduct an experiment on solidarity, asking: How do we convince allies? Taking Sarah Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s The Power of the Wild Disabled Idea as inspiration, we will invite people to participate in activities that expose the invisible labour of accessibility, not as a simulation exercise but as tools for collective understanding. Activities may include organizing an accessible protest (e.g. structured breaks, low-stimuli tent, inflatable beds, opportunities to sit/lie, etc) that coincides with the tentative reopening of the Brussels Central elevator in September.
This project treats accessibility not as a technical issue but as a political and collective question. By creating spaces for anger, researching disability resistance and experimenting with allyship, the project seeks to imagine new forms of collective action and public solidarity. We frame this as a deliberately ‘wild disabled idea’: a project that asks why a city can systematically exclude disabled people and yet remain emotionally untouched, unmoved, and unbothered. What would it take for visceral, contagious anger to surface around disability injustice, and how such eruptions might force others to finally notice what the city has trained itself not to see?
The Wheelies Project VZW is a Brussels-based organization founded in December 2025, after operating for a year as an informal collective. The organization is led by a team of experiential experts and activists with a physical disability or chronic condition. The Wheelies Project plays a unique role at the intersection of activism, culture, and mobility policy, positioning itself as a reliable field partner for institutions seeking to improve structural accessibility.
Photo Credit: Glen Martin / The Denver Post via Getty Images
