Feminist city planning: why it matters for everyone
Urban design and planning has typically centred the male, middle-class, car-owning suburb-dweller above other demographics. Yet, as Rachel Weatherly argues here, there would be clear benefits to everybody if we paid more attention to the hostility embedded in androcentric city planning, and took some time to consider how we could do things differently.
There’s a growing case for women to be central to planning, public realm design, policy development and budgets.
In 2022, Glasgow City Council passed a motion to put “feminist principles” front and centre of its future city development and town planning projects, taking the lead from Barcelona, which adopted a similar strategy in 2015.
Young Women Lead report
In 2021, Young Women Lead published a report encouraging Glasgow City Council to consider feminist urban planning recommendations.
The report, which focused on Glasgow’s bus system and its public parks, found that “many women and non-binary people have concerns over safety, accessibility, convenience, and affordability,” when it comes to using public space. 67% of women and non-binary people reported feeling unsafe using Glasgow’s buses. Many more said parks are a ‘no-go’ area after dark.
These statistics speak to a pernicious phenomenon: one where women across the world face the added burden of calculating the risk of a foray into the outside world before they have left their house.
It is particularly problematic when we consider the fact that maintaining the wellbeing of families and communities — whether through care, nutrition, hygiene or education — is traditionally a woman’s responsibility. These tasks often require the use of public space.
For women living in poverty, with an abusive partner, or in a precarious housing situation, feminist-conscious city planning has the potential to be life-changing. Deprived women are likely to rely on public services more heavily, and the implications of being cut off from spaces like family planning centres, shelters, and hospitals are even more severe.
When harm does occur, solutions are oriented around what the women can do: carry pepper spray and a rape alarm, avoid certain streets and neighborhoods deemed ‘high threat’.
But what would it mean if women didn’t have to reroute themselves away from danger areas?
What if these ‘danger areas’ didn’t exist in the first place?
Feminist town planning
According to a report by Arup, the United Nations Development Program, and the University of Liverpool, “designing cities that work for women creates wider social, economic, and environmental benefits, along with safer, healthier, and more inclusive spaces, not just for women but for entire households and communities”.
The report’s findings come from interviews, surveys and co-creation workshops. They were aimed at unpacking how councils might begin work to undo the gender bias that has characterised city development historically, and instead design cities that function well for women, keep them safe, and meet their basic needs.
Feminist city planning means physical adjustments: widening sidewalks to accommodate prams, wheelchairs and electric scooters, increasing the coverage of street lights and toilets, and enhancing the visibility and openness of green spaces, particularly at night.
These considerations would enhance wellbeing and quality of life for everybody, and this is precisely the benefit of feminist urban design: everybody gains.
More than safety
So, feminist city planning principles are about much more than safety.
At the heart, they fundamentally aim to enhance quality of life and a sense of community-belonging for everybody. Inclusive, considered planning ensures that the important elements of wellbeing, like the right to community and movement identified in the Quality of Life Foundation framework, is accessible.
Are public transport options accessible, reliable, and affordable? Are amenities, public spaces and social activities tailored to vulnerable people’s wants and needs? Do cultural, aesthetic and symbolic features of city life, like street names, monuments and public art reference a diversity of lived experiences and contributions to society?
Feminist city planning also means creating communal public ‘third’ spaces for women to socialise — and that these spaces are reflective of the spaces women create for themselves.
As Leslie Kern proposes in her book, Feminist City, a feminist town planning approach would centre “the creative tools that women have always used to support one another and find ways to build that support into the very fabric of the urban world”.
We must consider the tasks that occupy women’s lives, and design cities to alleviate these burdens. All genders have much to gain, in a material and abstract sense, from a public arena that embraces and nurtures them.
________________________________________________________________________
Rachel is a built environment communications consultant working across architecture, development, design and investment spheres and an associate at the Quality of Life Foundation. Rachel has a keen interest in inclusive urban design, and how property and real estate can be a force for social good. She graduated with a BA in Politics and Sociology from Murray Edwards college, University of Cambridge in 2020.