Engendering Cities

Designing Sustainable Urban Spaces for All

Inés Sánchez de Madariaga, Michael Neuman, Inés Sánchez de Madariaga, Michael Neuman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351200899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Engendering Cities examines the contemporary research, policy, and practice of designing for gender in urban spaces. Gender matters in city design, yet despite legislative mandates across the globe to provide equal access to services for men and women alike, these issues are still often overlooked or inadequately addressed. This book looks at critical aspects of contemporary cities regarding gender, including topics such as transport, housing, public health, education, caring, infrastructure, as well as issues which are rarely addressed in planning, design, and policy, such as the importance of toilets for education and clothes washers for freeing-up time. In the first section, a number of chapters in the book assess past, current, and projected conditions in cities vis-à-vis gender issues and needs. In the second section, the book assesses existing policy, planning, and design efforts to improve women's and men's concerns in urban living. Finally, the book proposes changes to existing policies and practices in urban planning and design, including its thinking (theory) and norms (ethics).

The book applies the current scholarship on theory and practice related to gender in a planning context, elaborating on some critical community-focused reflections on gender and design. It will be key reading for scholars and students of planning, architecture, design, gender studies, sociology, anthropology, geography, and political science. It will also be of interest to practitioners and policy makers, providing discussion of emerging topics in the field.

1

Planning the Gendered City

Inés Sánchez de Madariaga and Michael Neuman

Women and gender became more prominent issues in city planning and architecture in the 1970s, propelled by activists and scholars whose ideas seeped into practice, even as they were fueled from practice in the feminist movements of the era. Prior to this, initial forays were made by pioneers in the US including Catherine Bauer Wurster (Bauer 1934; Wurster 1963), Jane Addams (Knight 2005), Jaqueline Tyrwhitt (Shoshkes 2013). In Europe, collaborative efforts uniting female patrons, architects, social reformers and designers contributed to the building of a great number of women’s spaces in Berlin from the German unification in 1871 to the end of World War I (Stratigakos 2008). These included housing, restaurants, schools, and exhibitions halls. Women have long played important roles in urban development as patrons and social reformers (Durning & Wrigley 2000).

However, conventional histories of planning and architecture do not always acknowledge these roles, or, more importantly, their impact on the built environment. A case in point is the key role played by Henrietta Barnett in the building of Hampstead Garden Suburb (Hall 1988). While the roles of Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin in the development and design of this most important example of 20th-century urbanism is taught in planning courses around the world, the role played by Barnett in securing actual development and buying the land goes mostly unnoticed. Yet without it, Hampstead as a model garden suburb would not have been built. Histories have also typically missed the pioneering housing complexes designed for professional women who did not have time to devote to overseeing that domestic chores were properly carried out by service personnel.

Women were also active in those earlier times in countries not well represented in the mainstream planning literature, such as Spain. There, the accomplishments of women such as Concepción Arenal, founder of Spanish feminism, who established a company devoted to building cheap homes for workers, reformed the prison system, and was the first woman to attend university in 1841 (Martínez et al. 2000) often go unnoticed. Of course there are many other less well-known women pioneers, in Spain and many other countries, who need to be found in local and national historical research sources and archives, and brought into the light of planning and its history. This would serve to give a fairer and more balanced representation of the role women played individually, as professionals, patrons, or social reformers, and through collective action, in shaping urban environments, and how they addressed gender or women’s issues as they would have been called at the time, during the 19th and early-to-mid-20th centuries.

These activist-professionals practiced primarily, and some came to the academy on the strength of their accomplishments. Since the beginning of the 1970s, a more academic outlook prevailed in the US with the work of pioneering academics such as Dolores Hayden, Susana Torre, Karen Franck, Mary McLeod, Joan Ockman, Daphne Spain, Diana Agrest, Sandra Rosenbloom, and many others. Although significant research was also produced in Europe from the 1980s by Clara Greed, Marion Roberts, Chris Booth, Jos Boys, Dory Reeves, Teresa Boccia, Sasa Lada, Liisa Horelli, Inés Sánchez de Madariaga, and others, the European approach was overall more practically oriented. Matrix, the Women Design Service in the UK (Matrix 1984; Berglund & Wallace 2013), or the Eurofem network in Scandinavia (Horelli, Booth, & Gilroy 2000) are good examples of this, as well as specific initiatives developed both by public administration in many countries, such as in Oslo (Ministry of Environment 1993), by professional associations, such as the British Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) (Reeves 1989) and more recently by academic entities such as the UNESCO Chair on Gender in Science Technology and Innovation based at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, in Spain (Sánchez de Madariaga 2020). In Latin America, women architects and planners have approached the issue from a mostly activist position, even if sometimes grounded in the academy. A case in point is the network Mujer y Habitat de América Latina.¹

The development of these experiences was supported by insights resulting from those early gendered approaches to the city and its living practices, tracing the differences in experiencing urban space by the two genders. Moreover, the gender-sensitive approach to cities and their planning and design was abetted by a European-wide legal framework developed since 1998, when the Treaty of Amsterdam included a requirement for gender mainstreaming in all spheres of public policy (Council of Europe 1998; Sánchez de Madariaga 2003). Today, although the practical experience of gender planning is uneven across countries in Europe, fragile in many cases, and generally far from real institutionalization, it is true that specific experiences are widespread and gender is finally becoming embedded in the city-building agenda (Sánchez de Madariaga & Roberts 2013).

The current context is quite different from the one in which earlier, pioneering work on women and gender in cities, planning, and architecture took place. While the situation of women has greatly improved in terms of access to employment, full integration, and equal recognition is still far into the future. It is worth mentioning that an increasing number of women among students in the professions of the built environment translates very unevenly into their actual participation in the workforce and in decision-making in those professions, which in most countries has remained heavily male dominated (De Graft-Johnson, Manley, & Greed 2005; Sánchez de Madariaga 2010). At the same time, care of the home and of dependents continues to be basically women’s work, as the statistics produced by Eurostat demonstrate.²

Thus, built environments need to better respond to gender-specific needs arising from new societal challenges, which imply profound social and economic changes. Such changes include evolving and less-predictable life cycles for both men and women, the reduction in birthrates, the diversification of household structures, including the increase of single-person and female-headed households with children, the aging of the population with mostly female higher quintiles, a mostly female population of care givers, whether at home or in public or private services, and the increasing racial and ethnic diversification of societies.

“Intersectionality”, a new concept referring to the ways in which discrimination affects groups and individuals in whom more than one potential trait of discrimination coalesce – because of gender, race, ethnicity, age, socio-economic status, etc. – and are for this reason in positions of greater vulnerability, is an increasingly important focus of attention for both research and policy.

While economic growth in the developing world is substantially improving the quality of life of many, increasing economic disparities within countries and reduction of safety nets in Europe and elsewhere at the aftermath of the crisis, provide for more unstable contexts for many in the developed world. Greece is a case in point, but significant sections of the population in Southern European, as well as Northern European countries, live in situations of greater precariousness than became the norm in the last half of the 20th century, as the “jobs for life” typical of the Fordist period have all but disappeared and the safety nets provided by welfare state provisions are trimmed across the continent. Women and children in Europe are over-represented among those living in precarious conditions.

Factoring in gender-specific concerns allows planners and designers to provide and enable a physical environment where daily life is better supported than it is today. Additionally, as new urban issues arise in relation to environmental challenges, technological developments, globalization, and the aspiration of reaching the UN Sustainable Development Goals by improving the quality of life of people around the globe, means that research and action need to address these issues while at the same time properly integrating gender considerations.

We expect that the key contribution of this book will be to assert that it is time once again to bring women and gender to the forefront of the research agenda in planning. It is an important moment from the point of view of urban policy, with major ongoing international developments: the New Urban Agenda, the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development, the Paris COP Agreement on Climate Change, the Sendai Agreements, and others.

Within this context, as existing European and national legislation on gender mainstreaming in city building is further implemented, we need to inform these developments with gender-aware theoretical and conceptual frameworks and with the necessary empirical data fitted to present and especially future contexts. This potentially positions planners as leaders in setting the urban research, policy, and design agendas. This book addresses a number of relevant topics for this advancement of gender into contemporary planning agendas.

The chapters in this book cover key topics that are central to gendered approaches to planning, authored by mostly European and North American scholars whose focus goes in a number of cases beyond these geographical areas to also include other parts of the world.

The persistent disparities that women face in cities and in rural areas are pertinent to planners and policymakers. In those parts of the world that international organizations refer to as “emerging economies” or “the developing world”, wealth and other disparities are more pronounced. In the developing world women still face massive material needs and suffer explicit legal discrimination in terms of gender equality, for instance in access to property and inheritance rights (Giovarelli & Wamalwa 2011). In countries where water, energy, or sanitation is not widely accessible, women spend endless hours fetching for water and biomass because they cook without a steady source of energy and many still wash by hand. Lack of access to water, sanitation, and toilets in homes and schools is a major cause of girls not getting educated, resulting in reduced employment opportunities for adult women, and of sexual violence against them.

Clara Greed looks at global sanitation issues with particular reference to the needs of girls and women in respect of toilet provision in her chapter, “Public Toilets: The Missing Component in Designing Sustainable Urban Spaces for Women”. Over two billion people lack adequate toilet provision and women are particularly badly affected. Fifty percent of schoolgirls in Africa leave school when menstruation starts because of lack of school toilets, thus undermining education and development goals. Greed’s chapter also addresses the public toilet situation in the West with particular reference to inadequate provision in the United Kingdom. Historically, women have been given fewer facilities than men, but arguably their need is greater. Lack of toilets has implications for health and wellbeing by restricting the mobility of the elderly, those with disabilities and children, undermining, as a result, sustainability, transportation, inclusive urban design, and regeneration policies. Ways of integrating toilet provision into city-wide strategic planning policy and into local urban design are discussed in this chapter as crucial elements to creating sustainable, efficient, accessible, and equitable cities.

For the many millions in the next higher income bracket, who do have access to electricity and energy for cooking, among whom there are many who do not have access to washing machines, not even shared ones, washing by hand is a major obstacle to freeing time for education and gainful employment. In Europe, the widespread access to washing machines during the middle of the 20th century has been a major factor allowing women the time to educate themselves and enter the labor force in big numbers. One co-author of this chapter has argued elsewhere, in an op-ed written for UN-Habitat, that access to washing machines could be a good indicator to measure progress in three concurrent agendas – i.e. the New Urban Agenda of Habitat III, the Sustainable Development Goals, and the Climate Change Agreements – that would simultaneously take into consideration their gender equality implications (Sánchez de Madariaga 2015).

According to Rosling³ only two billion people today have access to private washing machines, while washing linen and clothing for many from among the remaining five billion people in the world is done by women who spend many hours every day washing by hand. Following Rosling’s estimations, when the two billion people today under the poverty line and the additional two billion impoverished persons expected to gain access to electricity in the coming years do so, it is imperative that we look at the gender dimensions of how this happens. Ensuring access to washing for these wide sections of the population in the so-called developing world will have very significant implications in terms of urban infrastructure and planning, use of energy, and emissions into the atmosphere. A significant increase in the number of women in the segment of those who have access to both electricity and washing machines will prove a key leap forward for gender equality in the world. But this cannot happen in an environmentally sustainable way without a very significant change in energy production and in consumption patterns by people in the upper-income bracket. Again, according to Rosling, given current trends, this group will consume more than half of the world’s energy, which consumption itself is projected to almost double. This unsustainable pattern needs to be cut by half or more, through more efficient use of energy and increased use of green energy.

The transportation sector, which has significant gender implications as shown in the chapters by Loukaitou-Sideris and Blumenberg, is one sector in which important changes need to occur in order to reduce environmental impacts and energy consumption. The potential negative implications for gender equality in urban policies that prioritize environmental objectives are illustrated within a First-World context by Evelyn Blumenberg in her chapter, “Why Low-Income Women Need Cars in the U.S.”. Drawing on a diverse body of literature and data, she shows why low-income women need automobiles. Their demand for cars emerges from the shifting geographic location of employment and homes, the characteristics of women’s work and the labor market, and women’s household responsibilities. A growing body of scholarship on the role of automobiles in shaping outcomes for low-income women shows how those who are able to access automobiles experience a host of benefits including better employment opportunities, access to healthier food, and greater health-care use. In spite of this evidence, there are relatively few efforts to increase automobile use among low-income households in the US, likely due to the costs and the negative environmental externalities associated with driving. Programs and policies that have proven to be effective are discussed. Blumenberg argues that if automobiles are essential to women’s livelihoods, policies ought to balance the need for automobiles with efforts to reduce their negative environmental impact.

While today in many of the OECD countries basic material needs are mostly covered, women still tend to face greater constraints than men in their daily lives. These constraints relate to: (i) unequal access to employment, including the gender pay gap and greater part time employment for women; (ii) greater home and caring responsibilities; (iii) and scarce free time for leisure and self-care. Urban structures and transportation systems put constraints on the movements of persons who have to juggle care responsibilities and paid employment, including the lack of sufficient and adequately located and accessible support services for caring for the young and the old, as is explained below. Factors contributing to this state of affairs include gender stereotypes, gender bias, which can sometimes be unconscious, and discrimination – both direct and indirect – even in Europe despite it technically being illegal (Sánchez de Madariaga et al. 2011).

Contemporary labor markets across the world show both vertical and horizontal gender segregation, both of which contribute to women’s greater economic fragility. Horizontal segregation occurs when women are concentrated in jobs traditionally considered feminine jobs, mostly in the health, the educational, and the service sectors. These are often less well paid com...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Planning the Gendered City
• Part I: Engendering Urban Transportation
• Part II: Engendering Planning for Urban Justice
• Part III: Tools for Engendering Planning
• Index