We invite academics who deliver ethnographically or qualitatively informed studies on gender-inclusive spaces and cities to join our conversation. If you are interested in sharing your research with us, please drop us a message.
An interest sparked by her academic research, Sarah aims to engage the audience in a discussion about what a feminist city might be, what it means for those who use it, and how one could be created. Inspired by The Feminist City (Leslie Kern, 2020), her talk focuses on feminist critiques of the history of city planning, concepts of feminist utopia, and contemporary urban issues such as zoning, transport, and safety, illustrated through three international case studies: Umeå, Vienna, and Malmö.
This talk is part of Sarah’s master’s research at Leeds Beckett University. She focuses on the built environment and how urban designers can create sustainable urban spaces that promote equality. Her work pays particular attention to how cities can be designed to be gender-equal and encourage all people to use and engage with urban spaces. She is interested in hearing the views, opinions, and experiences of everyone who interacts with urban spaces to help inform how these spaces can better respond to diverse needs.
Gender-inclusive Cities: Exploring a Feminist Critique of Planning by Sarah Parry, Leeds Beckett University
In this interview, Ana discusses the paradoxes of urban growth that limit women’s social equality in cities. She focuses on opportunities to improve urban planning to empower women with greater autonomy, security, and access to public services. In the Latin American and Caribbean context, poor women are often concentrated in the informal labour market and earn significantly lower wages than men. Although women represent the majority at all levels of education, inequalities persist in the labour market.
Ana argues that questions of equal access and use extend beyond physical spaces to include symbolic and political dimensions of how people inhabit cities and who uses urban spaces. Ana Falú, architect, professor, and researcher, is Director of INVIHAB Research on Housing and Habitat Institute and Director of the Master’s Course in Housing Management and Development at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the National University of Córdoba, Argentina. She co-founded the Women and Habitat Network and serves as its Argentina Focal Point, 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 challenge how design decisions impact different groups based on identity. By combining personal experience with the practical realities of civil engineering, she illustrates how cities can be redesigned to better serve diverse people and bodies. Through centring feminist and social justice ideas, Ellie explores how cities can be transformed so that no one is excluded from public spaces or from the resources and opportunities urban environments offer.
Ellie is Director of the City Leadership Laboratory and Lecturer in Urban Innovation and Policy at University College London. She has conducted research on urban infrastructure and social justice, including a UN-Habitat report on Safer Smarter Cities for Women and Girls and a collaboration with the Liveable Cities research programme on gender and urban design. She is currently working with the London Mayor’s Office of Policing and Crime on a scoping study for their UN Women Safe Cities work.
Gender-inclusive cities: Gender Space Intersections by Vani Subramanian
Women, men, trans people, children, older adults, people with disabilities, and Dalits often experience different versions of the same spaces—whether private or public, work or leisure—because spatial arrangements reflect and reinforce social inequalities. Conversely, how people inhabit, use, negotiate, or appropriate these spaces can redefine and transform them.
The installation and workshop OPA|CITY: Gender. Space. Intersections highlight how gender both shapes and is shaped by the city—its physical organisation, transformations over time, inscriptions of sexuality, and implicit codes of behaviour—all of which must be interrogated from the perspectives of creators, consumers, and critics of built spaces. Urban design must be sensitive to the subtle yet significant ways in which the city is presented to gendered subjectivities. Planners’ concerns should move beyond narratives of risk and safety toward a nuanced understanding of how gender influences our presence in the city and what this means for imagining just, equitable, and inclusive urban futures.