Feminist Urbanism: What It Is, Principles and City Examples

Feminist urbanism is the current of planning and urban design that starts from a finding: cities have been built with a default user in mind, an adult man, healthy, with a car and no caring responsibilities, and so they work badly for everyone who does not fit that profile. Its aim is not to design cities for women but cities for everyone's daily life: those who care, those who walk, those pushing a pram or leaning on a cane, those coming home at night. The British sociologist Jane Darke summed up the diagnosis in 1996 with a sentence that has become famous: our cities are patriarchy written in stone, brick, glass and concrete.

Jane Darke and the man-shaped city

Darke, in the chapter The Man-Shaped City in the book Changing Places: Women's Lives in the City (1996), showed how the separation of uses in modern planning, housing in one place, work in another, shops in a third, assumed a division of labour: the man travels to his job and the woman stays in the residential neighbourhood, without services or transport designed for her. When women entered paid employment, that geography did not change, and the double shift became a double commute as well. Care tasks, taking children to school, shopping, accompanying elderly relatives, require short, chained trips that the zoned, car-dependent city punishes.

Susan Fainstein: gender, planning and the just city

Susan Fainstein, political scientist at Harvard and co-editor with Lisa Servon of Gender and Planning: A Reader (2005), brought the question into planning theory. Her argument is that planning cannot be neutral because its criteria, efficiency, growth, mobility, have been defined without women's experience, and that incorporating gender requires changing what is measured and who decides. In The Just City (2010) she makes equity the priority criterion for evaluating urban policy, and gender is one of the central dimensions of that equity. Dolores Hayden, Leslie Kern and Barcelona's Col·lectiu Punt 6 complete a tradition that today has handbooks, tools and reference cities.

The four axes of feminist urbanism

Feminist urbanism works along four axes. Proximity: neighbourhoods with school, shops, health centre and care facilities within walking distance, so that daily tasks do not require a car. Perceived safety: lighting, visibility, active frontages and no blind corners, assessed through exploratory walks with local women. Transport: frequencies and routes that serve the chained trips of care work, not only the home-to-work commute, and accessibility for prams and wheelchairs. And housing: flexible types, shared spaces for collective care and locations close to services.

Vienna, Barcelona and Umeå: gender-sensitive planning in practice

Vienna is the most cited case. Since 1992 the city has applied a gender perspective to its planning under the direction of Eva Kail: the Frauen-Werk-Stadt complex of 1997, designed by women architects with a nursery, laundries and courtyards visible from the kitchens; parks redesigned so that girls are not pushed off pitches occupied by boys; and widened pavements and marked crossings after studying who walks. Barcelona has built gender audits into its superblocks, Umeå in Sweden built a pedestrian tunnel designed by women to remove fear, and dozens of Latin American cities apply protocols against harassment on public transport.

The contribution of feminist urbanism goes beyond gender. A city designed for those who care is also better for children, older people, people with disabilities and anyone who walks, because it puts daily life at the centre. Darke and Fainstein agree that the change is not only technical but political: it requires women and hitherto invisible groups to take part in decisions about the city, and equity to become the criterion for evaluating every plan and every budget.