“This is a man’s world” claimed James Brown in his famous song. And this is still true. The 8th March was the International Women’s Day, an occasion to recall the numerous gender inequalities that still remain: from wages to domestic violence, or the lack of women in decision-making spheres…
Where do cities stand today ? In a world where half of the world’s population is urban, and a small majority of them are female, the question of women’s place in cities is crucial. How is the presence of women visible in our streets? How do women think and design cities and public transport ? What main issues do they come across every day, and how can these be solved to improve their access to public space? Here’s a quick overview of the ambivalent relationship women have with cities.
When cities and public transport are designed by women
Even if women are now well-represented in planning and architecture studies, the built-environment professions – and particular their uppermost echelons – remain heavily male-dominated. An over-representation that has consequences on the way cities are built.
In a Guardian article published in December 2014, female architects point out the lack of women in the profession, and wonder how the city would look like if there were more women in charge of designing it. If female architects are as interested in financial profits as their male colleagues, the fact that they belong to a minority surely influences their work – and it is not only confined to toilets and child care areas. They tend to be more pragmatic than men, have a more collaborative approach to making decisions, and are better at seeing things from different sides to create more inclusive spaces.
This trend is also observable in the area of urban transport. As males will focus on technical issues, women are more likely to be interested in practical aspects, such as the location of a bicycle parking, the station’s opening hours or the accessibility of a bus stop. These questions may be seen as anecdotal, but they are key to the success of a transport project. The Guardian
The gender imbalance in city street names (and how to resolve it)
We live in cities thought and built by men, but street names are quite manly too. Only 2.6 percent of the French capital’s streets are named after women. With her mapping platform Mapbox, the engineer Aruna Sankaranarayanan made the same observation with the streets of Bengaluru, Chennai, London or San Francisco, and found out that only 27,5% of the streets are named after women in those cities.
The streets named after men are not just omnipresent, but they are also more centrally located. You are more likely to find George Washington in the main streets of your city – about 5.000 streets are named after him in the United States, while women’s names are confined to small streets.
Politics try to rebalance this inequality by giving more female names to their streets: on 36 naming proposals this year, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo chose 22 women. The City council of Nantes, a city located in western France, launched a call for ideas to find female names to its future streets. The project was enthusiastically welcomed by the inhabitants, who could suggest any past female personality. 40 women’s names were finally selected by a citizen committee. 20Minutes
Mapping street harassment
The media often talk about street harassment, a form of violence widely experienced by women and deeply influencing their use of public spaces. The forms of street harassment are multiple, as it can go from honking and leering to sexual assault. According to a Stop Street Harassment survey, 70 to 99% of women have experienced it at some point during their lives. But street harassment is rarely reported, accepted as “a price to pay” for being a woman.
How to demonstrate the recurrence of this phenomenon to raise awareness among authorities? Mapping is often an effective way to make a problem visible and highlight the widespread characteristic of an issue. In Egypt, the non-profit Harassmap crowdsourced SMS and online reports of sexual harassment and mapped them on an online map. Each dot represents a report (the full text is available in Arabic). The map is a real tool to identify the trends of street harassment, provide some support to victims, and create communication campaigns. Harassmap
Empowering women in public places
What can be done on site to give the city back to women? Actions are taken to empower women and solve the unequal use of public space.
To create a more equal space for both gender, some organizations decided to identify issues with those concerned. The French non-profit Womenability launched an ambitious project of exploratory walks in 25 cities around the world. In Malmö, Prague or Montevideo, the founders will explore the public space with inhabitants to identify issues encountered by women, and rethink the city so both women and men feel at ease.
At the end of its tour, Womenability intends to organize a two-day forum in Paris, with the collaboration of UN Women and the City council of Paris, to elaborate operational solutions. Socialter