Women and Cities: Advances and Gaps in Urban Research

Women and cities is the field of research that studies how women live in, use and are excluded from urban space, and four decades after the historian Dolores Hayden asked in 1980 what a non-sexist city would be like, it still has important gaps. A systematic review published in 2019 by Mashhadi Moghadam and Rafieian, which analysed 275 academic articles published between 1977 and 2019, shows that publications have grown strongly in the last decade, but that they concentrate in the United States and the United Kingdom, treat safety and health in a fragmentary way and rarely move from diagnosis to proposal. Its conclusions serve as a map of what urban research knows about women and of what it still ignores.

The geography of knowledge: the US, the UK and the absent rest

The first finding is the geography of knowledge. Most studies come from the Anglophone world, and the cities of Asia, Africa and Latin America, where most of the planet's urban women live and where informality, violence and lack of services affect them most harshly, barely appear. That concentration reproduces the problem Jennifer Robinson denounced for urban theory in general, and means that the available recommendations were designed for contexts with public transport, lighting and police that in many cities do not exist.

Safety: much diagnosis of fear, little evaluation of measures

The second gap is safety. Women's fear in public space has been the most recurrent theme of the literature since the 1980s, with Gill Valentine's work on the geography of fear, but the review finds that most studies describe insecurity without evaluating which interventions reduce it. Gender-sensitive safety audits, begun in Toronto in 1989 and extended by UN Women in its Safe Cities programme since 2010, and design measures, lighting, visibility, night-time request stops, exist, but the research that measures their results is scarce and hard to compare.

Economic inequality, care mobility and gender budgeting

The third axis is economic inequality. Women, especially those from marginalised groups, face specific barriers to employment, mobility and services: chained care trips that radial transport does not serve, fares that penalise short and multiple journeys, neighbourhoods without childcare or local shops. The review notes that urban policies can perpetuate or mitigate those inequalities, but that studies of economic justice evaluating concrete measures are lacking, such as Vienna's integrated fares or the gender budgeting that city has applied since the 1990s.

Right to the city and inclusive design: the pending tasks

The last two themes are the right to the city and design. Feminist research has demanded women's participation in urban decision-making, but the review concludes that women from disadvantaged sectors remain absent from planning processes. And although it has been documented since Hayden and Jane Darke that women experience the city differently, efforts to design inclusive environments, with exceptions such as the gender planning of Vienna, Barcelona or Umeå, remain limited and little evaluated. Leslie Kern, in Feminist City (2019), has restated that agenda for a general audience.

The lesson of the review is that knowledge about women and cities has advanced more in describing the problem than in solving it. Diversifying the contexts studied, evaluating safety and economic interventions with comparable data, integrating intersectionality and guaranteeing the participation of women with fewer resources are the tasks future research must take on so that the right to the city stops being a demand and becomes a measurable practice.