5 practical steps to make cities more gender inclusive (that aren’t about lighting)

It was International Women’s Day this week. This is always an exciting day to celebrate so many game-changing women – choosing to challenge and taking up positions of power and influence.

Making women visible and seen and celebrated on March 8th is important - like these 18 city-makers. However outside of this day, we still have work to do in challenging the status quo. This goes for all spheres and is especially important for city-making. Because how we shape our neighbourhoods ultimately impacts all aspects of our lives, our level of opportunity, even our life expectancy.

Gender equality is a prerequisite for the wellbeing of neighbourhoods and the prosperity of cities. Yet gender divides, and how they manifest in neighbourhoods, remain poorly understood. They are often absent from our design conversations and far from our public discourse in city-making.

Worldwide, women occupy just 10 percent of the highest-ranking jobs at leading architecture firms and urban planning offices (World Bank, 2020). Women and gender minorities are also less represented in participatory and engagement processes that contribute to city-making processes. This means that, on the whole, cities are designed by men and work better for men.

In the World Bank’s recent publication – Handbook for Gender-Inclusive Urban Planning and Design – Lead Urban Specialist, Horacio Terraza, notes "The urban space determines how we organise our lives and our communities, and most definitely, our society. As such, it reflects and reproduces the gender stereotypes with which we grew up and co-exist."

"The urban space determines how we organize our lives and our communities, and most definitely, our society. As such, it reflects and reproduces the gender stereotypes with which we grew up and co-exist." (World Bank)

We know these facts and statistics, they’re not new. And while for the most part they’re moving in the right direction, it’s also 2021. 

Celebrating women isn’t enough.

Here I want to share some thoughts on how we can #choosetochallenge our everyday city making processes to make them more inclusive of gender this year. This isn’t a specific list of design requirements. It would be great if it was as simple as adding more lighting, but gender and intersectionality are much more complex and need a holistic response.

Instead, I want to show how we can make gender-mainstreaming part of everyday practice by asking the right questions, listening, seeking representation, gaining knowledge, funding more gender inclusive practices and measuring outcomes. 

Bank Australia's Recent campaign features Zoe Condliffe, Founder and CEO of She's a Crowd. Photo credit: Neighbourlytics

6 practical steps

City-making is a process. It doesn’t happen by itself, it involves hundreds of decisions made by hundreds of people. Therefore if we mainstream gender as a cross-cutting theme, we can make it easier for us to learn, listen, and find solutions together. From a process perspective then, here are five things to pay attention to:

1. Ask the Question

There are a number of considerations to make when it comes to creating gender inclusive cities. A key starting point can often be as simple as asking the question – what about this project / masterplan / design process would make it more gender inclusive? In the international development sector, where mainstreaming of cross cutting issues – from gender to youth to disability to anti-racism – is common practice, often a starting point is to have a list of issues that need to be considered as part of the program design. This isn’t about a checklist so much as a mindset, opening up new lines of enquiry and learning.   

2. Listen and Learn

Learning about the context of a place or neighbourhood, how it’s used and experienced is another starting point for most projects. However, unconsciously we each bring large amounts of bias to how we understand places based on our own lived experience and lifestyle preferences. Taking time to consider, listen to and learn about how women and gender minorities experience a particular place, which might be completely different from our own, is essential. It often challenges our assumptions of what we understand that place to be known for. For example - most women won’t feel safe walking along at night, and will alter their movement, travel times to avoid feeling unsafe.

Not everyone will be willing to share their stories and feedback upfront, many topics are sensitive. Consider using platforms such as She’s a Crowd gathers thousands of anonymised stories of gender-based violence. Safeti Pin helps women make safer mobility choices using crowd-sourced data. Our own work at Neighbourlytics provides place context from a social life perspective, helping to understand, quantify and benchmark the social and economic context.

3. Seek Representation

Women and gender minorities make up over half the population, and as such should be equally represented in all levels of decision making for cities – from public participation and engagement activities to design decisions and policy making. We should be aiming for 50%.

4. Fund gender inclusive practices

Your values are where your budget is. As mentioned in the intro: it’s 2021. Platitudes and thanks aren’t enough when it’s estimated that it will take 100 years to close the gender gap. Consider buying from female-led businesses, funding unconscious bias training for your company, sponsoring programs that promote women’s leadership in planning or donating to research on gender-inclusive cities – an area that’s still poorly understood.

5. Measure outcomes

How do we know if we’ve got it right? Measurement and data is at the heart of driving change and shifting the dial on gender inclusive places – if we can’t measure it (or understand it) we can’t manage or solve it, to paraphrase Peter Drucker. 

There’s a lot to be said on measurement. The UN Sustainable Development Goals are another good starting point and have a number of indicators for making cities inclusive for women and girls. The SDGs challenge us to consider gender equality as a prerequisite for good quality public space. Indicator 11.7 (Cities) states “By 2030, provide universal access to safe, inclusive and accessible, green and public spaces, in particular for women and children, older persons and persons with disabilities”. 

2030 is just 9 years away. We’ve got work to do. Gender equality needs to become an essential part of our city-making dialogue and everyday practice, and as city-makers, we have a critical role in creating places for (all) people. Let’s shift the dial in 2021.