**9. Visual Accessibility**

Visual accessibility is our third category of accessibility. It refers to unobstructed sightlines from the urban hinterland towards the coast. Protection of sightlines means, first and foremost, prevention of architectural configurations of large and tall structures close to the coastal area which block the sea view from city locations or routes. Since view of the coast is also a prime real-estate asset, intervention to enhance visual accessibility is likely to be resisted by developers or property owners.

Urban planning and design policies could contribute to greater fairness in the social distribution of coastal views. Ostensibly, this topic is remote from national-level policies. Yet, embedding the public right to visual access in a national-level law or policy document could encourage local efforts to address the social-distributive aspects of visual access. In our comparative analysis, we wanted to know whether visual access is regarded as part of the public right to coastal access and how national policy addresses it. The findings, as shown in Table 1, indicate that, although this type of access right is not widely acknowledged, there are interesting exceptions. Perhaps they herald a rising legal recognition of visual access rights.

We were positively surprised that four of our jurisdictions already have explicit national or subnational provisions about protection of visual access to the coast, most introduced in recent years. These are Italy's Puglia region, the Netherlands, Spain, and Israel. In California, visual access rights have been implemented in practice in some cases and have received scholarly analysis due to a major court decision (See discussion in Section 7.1.3 about the US Supreme Court decision: Nollan v. California Coastal Commission).

Spain's 1988 Coastal Law was the pioneer among our set. The Law stipulates that buildings constructed within 500 m of the shoreline should not form "architectural screens" that block views to the sea—that is, the wider façade should be perpendicular to the shoreline (interpretation of the law [29]). As explained by Falco and Barbanente [33],

the Puglia's Regional Landscape and Territorial Plan (2015) has added a prohibition on construction within 300 m of the shoreline that would reduce coastal views. Jong & van Sandick [30] report that the Dutch General Spatial Planning Rules (2011) also require that a statutory land use plan approved at the local level should not enable construction that will obstruct the view of the horizon.

The latest to give explicit legal status to visual accessibility is Israel [38]. The national statutory plan adopted in 2020 goes beyond a general normative statement to install a new mandatory procedure. In considering the merits of any proposed project within the coastal zone, the developer should submit a "view impact statement" (our translation) to the relevant planning body. Although it is too soon to know how the courts will interpret this requirement, one can assume that it will pave a smoother road for judicial review of planning decisions, which, according to the petitioners, assign insufficient weight to the public's right to visual access. This innovation was stimulated by a court decision where a Tel Aviv NGO argued against approval of tall towers near the beach. The court ruled that the towers' heights should be reduced to minimise obstruction of the coastal views.

So, while the right to visual coastal access is less recognised in national legislation than the first and second category, there are signals of an international positive moment.

We now move to the fourth (and final) category of accessibility rights, where social aspects are at the forefront.

#### **10. Accessibility for People with Physical Disabilities**

*10.1. The Ratoinale for Assigning a Special Category*

The fourth category of coastal access rights is less focused on broad geographic rules serving an anonymous public and more on the special needs of individuals. Making a beach site accessible to persons with physical disabilities (PWD) usually entails some special construction works (e.g., the interventions shown in Figures 6 and 7), adding a disruption of the beach environment to some degree. In the comparative research, we wanted to know whether and how the research jurisdictions have addressed the inherent normative conflict between environmental protection and the rights of PWD.

Beach access rights for PWD are not a marginal issue. An estimated 15% of the global population has a disability of some form, many of whom are persons with physical disabilities [65]. A recent UN report reiterates the importance that national and local governments would increase their efforts to adjust public spaces and facilities to enable access by PWD [66]. There is a large body of literature on this broad topic by researchers in the medical, socio-psychological, and design fields (see, for example, [67–69]). There are even some papers about beach access for PWD written with tourism in mind [70,71]. Although many countries, including some in our sample, have general requirements about facilitating access to public spaces, these have yet to be adequately integrated into land use planning, as argued by Terashima and Clark [72].

The comparative analysis indeed shows that, in most jurisdictions, beach access rights of PWD have not yet become part of the norms governing coastal land use planning and management in general, and accessibility in particular. Before we discuss the two national exceptions, we should note that the absence of national-level legislation does not imply that good practices cannot emerge "from below", as part of the globally rising awareness of the rights of persons with disabilities. The Slovenian author, Marot [36], provides an interesting example of how NGO action has managed to convince the City of Izola to pioneer in designating one of its beaches as accessible to PWD, with commensurate design and facilities. The city also waved the entrance fee, which it was permitted to charge for "special facilities".

At the national level, the two notable exceptions are Italy's Puglia region and Israel. Puglia's Law of 2006 mandates that, when the Puglia Regional Government will prepare its Coastal Plan, the plan will ensure that local plans provide adequate access for people with disabilities [33]. This is the pioneering legislative anchoring of this right among the jurisdictions in our sample.

**Figure 6.** A wheelchair access ramp to the beach in Miami (Source: Dpalma01 on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Miami\_Beach\_ -\_Sand\_Dunes\_Flora\_-\_Beach\_Access\_Ramp\_for\_Wheelchairs\_Amid\_Seagrape\_Bushes.jpg, accessed on 2 March 2022.

**Figure 7.** A wheelchair at the end of an access ramp at a North Sea beach in Germany (Source: andreas160578 on Pixabay. Available at: https://pixabay.com/photos/wheelchair-disability-spadisabled-2082941/, accessed on 2 March 2022.
