City planner and researcher Gala Korniyenko learns how to see the invisible ways environments impact people with disabilities.
Gala Korniyenko is a city planner, researcher, and Fulbright Scholar who came to the United States with a planner's mind and a newcomer's disorientation. That tension never left her — and it shaped everything. She has spent her career asking one question: what does it actually feel like to navigate a city? She holds a doctoral degree from the Knowlton School at the Ohio State, where she co-developed the Six Feelings Framework, a research tool that translates sensory and emotional needs into design standards for more inclusive cities. She teaches city and regional planning at the OSU and directs research at the National Youth Advocate Program. She believes cities should work for everyone — especially the people they were never designed for.
Story Transcript
The first time I watched the Temple Grandin movie, I was still living in Ukraine. Temple Grandin is the first person I heard about who used autism visual thinking to her advantage when working as an animal welfare advocate and researcher. I remember sitting there watching the way the film visualized her thinking. The doors that open like diagrams. The bright flashes overwhelm that only she could see. For the first time in my life, I thought, “The physical environment isn't just buildings and structures. It's how the world feels to someone.”
That moment logged itself somewhere deep. I didn't know then that five years later, in 2018, I would stand in front of Temple Grandin herself, holding a copy of the Autism Design and Planning book that I helped to bring to life. I didn't say anything clever or profound. Inside it felt as magic, stunned that something from her world and something from mine had found a point of connection.
Years later, in my academic life, I often found myself explaining the difference between visible and invisible disability. Visible disability, someone using a wheelchair or cane, signals itself immediately, whether we like it or not. People just offer help. The world notices.
Invisible disability: cognitive, sensory, neurological, doesn't announce itself. There is no wheelchair for executive function, no crutch for sensory overload. People expect you to behave normally. And if you don't, well, here comes the labels. Difficult, strange, rude, dramatic. And then we joked with my autistic friends, “Sometimes I don't know if you are autistic or just obnoxious.”
For years in Knowlton, I researched how autism shapes the way people move, perceive, feel, and get overwhelmed in everyday environments. Our work on autism‑informed design and planning guidelines became a way to help neurotypical planners and architects emphasize and imagine with sensory overload, not as metaphor but as a lived reality.
“When did it start?” Students sometimes ask me. “Where are you in this story?” I never know how to answer. Am I a researcher or participant, foreigner, interpreter or planner, or all of the above?
Before all of this, I was working for the municipal government of Cherkasy, a city of 350,000 people in Ukraine. City planning and community engagement seemed logical, efficient, focused on rules, zoning system, and outcomes. I believed good planning was about visible things, sidewalks, curb cuts, densities, public transportation, and proximity to green spaces.
Then I started to work on the studio project with an autistic organization. One day, an autistic woman came to campus to give a guest lecture. Before her talk, she met me and said, “I visited the building yesterday on my own.” I asked why. She said, “I needed to walk the halls, memorize the floor plan, map out bathrooms and exits. I needed to feel calm before I could even think about presenting.”
The next morning, I stood in Knowlton Atrium, the vast concrete stairs, the glass tall windows, sharp, bouncing angles of light, and for the first time I really saw it. Architects had always celebrated the openness of the space, but for her it was a sensory obstacle course.
That conversation suddenly made me realize that sensory conflict is how a humming light, a sudden echo, a flash of brightness can pile up into overload. I realize architects and urban planners don't just design or regulate forms, they design the conditions under which some people can think, function, navigate, or disappear. Predictability became a design material as real as concrete.
That single conversation spiraled into years of research, community partnership, working audits, interviews, and design proposals, tools that help planners build not just inclusive cities, but navigable sensory environments.
In 2019, the American Planning Association National Conference gave our project student award. I remember standing there at this stage with my students and my colleague, Professor Kyle Ezell, nervous with a foreign accent and thinking, “This is just a start of something remarkable that will give our students inspired to be planners who care.”
When I first entered a doctoral program, I had to argue for my research. Disability, autism, what does it have to do with planning? People would lean back in the chair skeptical as if I'd wandered into the wrong discipline.
The first time I took a bus in Columbus, I got lost. Wrong buses, wrong transfers, wrong directions. I felt geographically lost, yes, but also socially. The feeling reminded me of something autistic adult once told me. That sense of being out of sync, left out, slightly misaligned with the real around you.
I learned two things living here. Being a foreigner, being neurodivergent share a specific kind of loneliness. You learn by watching what people are doing. You mimic to blend in. Neurotypical people notice emotions first, then behavior. Foreigners notice behavior, then context. And autistic thinkers often notice patterns and irregularities before anything else. All three ways of seeing are valid. All three can create misunderstanding.
I met another woman, a neuroscientist, trying to understand her own sensory profile. “You can imagine an embodied autistic person,” she said, “but you cannot imagine what is invisible to them, and sometimes invisible to yourself.”
That hit me with the force of a theory and the softness of confession. Invisible disability is not emptiness, it's fullness that cannot be seen. Maybe it's because I grew up with sensory sensitivity. Maybe I grew up in a system that didn't have words for it. Maybe because I have lived most of my life as an other, trying to decode the logic of a foreign world. But I have paid attention to how people move, fidget, avoid eye contact, overstimulate, shut down, or mimic social cues.
I mimic too language, humor, gestures. That's how I learned English, how I learned to belong. I started this journey as a planner focused on visible. I remain now a planner who cannot stop seeing the invisible. And once you truly see it, you can never unsee it again.