We invite academics who deliver ethnographically or qualitatively informed studies on gender-inclusive spaces and cities to be engaged in this conversation.
If you are interested to share your research with us, please drop us a message.
An interest sparked by her academic research, Sarah hopes to engage the audience in a conversation about what a feminist city may be, what this means for those using it, and how may one be created? Inspired by ‘The feminist city’ (Leslie Kern, 2020), her talk focuses on the feminist critique of the history of city planning; conceptions of feminist utopia; contemporary urban implications like zoning, transport and safety covering three international case studies. Umea, Vienna, Malmo.
This talk is part of Sarah’s master research at Leeds Beckett University. She is interested in the built environment and how urban designers can create sustainable urban spaces that promote equality. From her studies, she has taken a particular interest in how urban spaces can be created that are gender equal and encourage women and men to use and engage with the city equally. She is interested in hearing the views, opinions and experiences of everyone who interacts with urban spaces to help better inform how these spaces can respond to these needs.
Gender-inclusive Cities: Exploring a Feminist Critique of Planning by Sarah Parry, Leeds Beckett University
In this interview, Ana discusses the paradoxes of growth in cities that disallow women from achieving social equality in urban spaces. She focuses on issues of improving urban planning such as to empower women with more autonomy, security, and public services. In the current Latin American and Caribbean context, poor women are concentrated in the deregulated sector of the labour market, earning significantly lower wages than men. Notably, women make up the majority of all levels of education, and yet inequalities in the labour market still persist. Ana argues that the question of equal access and usage is not only about spaces as physical places, but also as symbolic and political sites of dispute about how individuals or groups of people inhabit the cities they live in, and who uses urban spaces.
Ana Falú, Architect, Professor and Researcher, is the Director of INVIHAB Research on Housing and Habitat Institute and Director of the Master Course on Housing Management and Development at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the National University of Córdoba, Argentina. She is also the co-founder of the Women and Habitat Network and the network’s Focal Point in Argentina, and coordinates the UNI UN Habitat Gender Hub.
Gender-inclusive Cities: Gender perspectives in urban planning by Prof. Ana Falú, National University of Córdoba
Gender-inclusive Cities: The Feminist City by Dr. Ellie Cosgrave, UCL
In ‘The Feminist City’, Dr Ellie Cosgrave uses urban planning to disrupt our thinking about how designing decisions impact different groups based on categories of identity. By weaving in personal experiences and supplementing them with the industrial realities of civil engineering, Ellie shows us how we can recreate the city to enable diverse peoples and bodies to get the very most of the places we live. Through centralising feminist and social justice ideas, Ellie explores how we can fundamentally transform our cities to ensure that no one is excluded from public spaces, or from the resources and opportunities cities have to offer.
Ellie is Director of the City Leadership Laboratory and Lecturer in Urban Innovation and Policy at University College London. She has led research in a variety of fields relating to urban infrastructure and social justice. Previously this has included work on gender in cities including a UN-Habitat report on Safer Smarter Cities for Women and Girls as well as a research collaboration with the Liveable Cities research programme on Gender and Urban Design. Currently Ellie is working with London’s Mayors Office of Policing and Crime to undertake a scoping study for their UN Women Safe Cities work.
Gender-inclusive cities: Gender Space Intersections by Vani Subramanian
Women, men, transpersons, children, the aged, the poor, the disabled and the Dalits often seem to occupy different versions of the same spaces, be they private or public, spaces of work or leisure, of permanence or those occupied in the passing. Because all spatial arrangements reflect and reinforce social inequalities. Yet conversely, the ways in which we inhabit, use, negotiate or even appropriate these spaces has the potential to redefine, and even transform, them.
The installation and workshop, OPA|CITY. Gender. Space. Intersections foregrounds how the category of gender shapes, and is in turn, shaped by the city ̶ its physical organisation, its temporal transformations, its inscriptions of sexuality, its implicit codifications ̶ all of which must be interrogated from our viewpoint of creators, consumers and critics of built spaces. Urban design must be sensitive to the subtle yet significant ways in which the city presents itself to a gendered subjectivity. The concern of planners should not merely be about creating safer cities, but rather about the equality of space. We need to step back from narratives of risk and safety, and move towards a nuanced understanding of how gender influences our being in the city, and what it means for our imagination of just, equitable and inclusive cities.