The focus of this study is how intended users of the built environment are categorized in strategies, policies, and guidelines for the planning and building process. The image of the intended user reflects a disabling society that also is in conflict with established policies on a society for all. Patterns of inequality are found in the materials, both within and across groups of users. With youth, health, and mobility in the foreground, older persons and persons with disabilities are almost never evident. Disability is made visible only through its mirror: the ability norm.In the review of planning documents from a medium-sized Swedish municipality, the study sought to identify if and how users are described and to analyse which users are included in or excluded from the urban environment during planning stages. The article argues that new ways of thinking, to include a diversity perspective in planning, are needed.

Universal Design (UD) is a design approach that recognises and anticipates diversity as a fundamental human condition. UD is also frequently referred to in relation to the social dimension of sustainable development. Central to both UD and sustainability is the way “everyone,” as the target of UD and sustainability goals, is understood. The purpose of the study is to identify how UD’s “everyone” is conceptualised in Swedish UD policy and to provide a set of recommendations for how to categorise people with regards to UD. A qualitative text analysis is used, which investigates semiotic modes in relation to the content, form, and social relations of texts. Based on the analysis, two challenges for UD policy are identified: (i) how to convey that UD is design for everyone, and (ii) how to move away from a thought pattern of norm and deviation. Seven recommendations for how to approach categorisations of people in UD policy are formulated. We argue that an adoption of UD has the potential to bring about sustainable living environments for all, if integrated with social, economic, environmental, and spatial dimensions of development, but that in order for this to succeed, careful attention needs to be paid to how UD is conceptualised, and a radically different way of categorising people is necessary.