http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/dec/05/if-women-built-cities-what-would-our-urban-landscape-look-like?CMP=share_btn_tw
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| Heydar Aliyev Center Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher Baku, Azerbaijan archdaily.com |
Hello Everyone:
Let us begin with a statement of the obvious, men and women think differently. Changing out think for design, men and women design differently. Susanna Rustin, writing in a recent article for The Guardian "If women built cities, what would our urban landscape look like?," asks the question what would urban landscapes look like if women, not men, designed them? Ms. Rustin begins by quoting United Kingdom-based architect Fiona Scott, partner at the firm Gort Scott, "I hate to stereotype...Male architects are often quite sensitive artistic people and any suggestion that buildings designed by women are more curvy, tactile, or colourful is wrong. But I don't think there are many women who think, 'Oh, my ideal project would be a massive tower.'" Ms. Scott also describes a generational gap between women working in the field now and those who have retired or close to it. The article is focused on Ms. Scott and whether or not gender influences her work but also has implications for all women architects.
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| The Museum of Modern Art Lina Bo Bardi and Oscar Niemayer São Paulo, Brasil archdaily.com |
It is quite common to learn about women who have not been properly credited for work, however, there are certain advantages to being female. Ms. Scott, "I've alway thought there was a benefit to being a woman [in this field] because you don't have to so much to get noticed, and if your ideas are any good then people want to hear what you've got to say." Working under the radar can be a good thing because you can develop your ideas without all the distraction of unwarranted publicity. Ms. Scott continues, "It's a mistake to think women aren't capable of having grand ideas...even if such ideas are often associated with big egos," in referring to Lina Bo Bardi, whose hundredth birthday was celebrated this year. Yours truly first thought is Zaha Hadid. Despite, her positive outlook, Fiona Scott admitted to Susanna Rustin that she struggled in her early career. "I would go to networking events that were full of guys who had a way of talking I found exhausting...Quite bullish, lots about sport. You find yourself feeing you have nothing to say. It's a vicious circle where your confidence gets diminished if people don't listen to you..."
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| The National Gallery extension Michael Venturi and Denise Scott Brown London, England theguardian.com |
The first thing one needs to pay attention to when discussing how cities would differ if women designed and built them is, despite the fact that women hold powerful positions, the biggest urban development decisions are still made by men. To be clear, there have been women architects, planners, and politicians who have inspired urban greatness. Of course, let us not forget the seminal book about urban design, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) was written by Jane Jacobs. However, around the the world the upper echelons of building professions (eg. architecture and urban planning) are still heavily male dominated. In the UK, Ms. Rustin cites a recent survey that found "the number of women in architecture firms fell from 28% to 21% between 2009 and 2011." In 2012, the Gendersite, a database created to feature information on gender and the built environment on the heels of the new gender parity duty for planners, closed due to lack of funds. Kate Henderson, chief of the Town and Country Planning Association, was interview by The Guardian described the construction field as a, "very, very male-dominated industry," Every female architect, planner, urbanist, and engineer interview for the article described what it is like to be the only woman in the room.
Environmental engineer Sarah Bell recently told Ms. Rustin at a gathering of the women's network group Urbanista's, "The thing about us...is that we don't actually know we're not meat to be doing physics until we get to university." Blogger's experience has been the opposite, no one ever told yours truly you couldn't do physics, ever. To put it another way, the teacher's at Ms. Bell's girls's school did not exactly warn her that she would be the only girl in class. Susanna Rustin writes, "Currently just 14% of UK engineering and technology students are female and just 7% of engineers, making the UK one of the least equal countries on this measure."
Environmental engineer Sarah Bell recently told Ms. Rustin at a gathering of the women's network group Urbanista's, "The thing about us...is that we don't actually know we're not meat to be doing physics until we get to university." Blogger's experience has been the opposite, no one ever told yours truly you couldn't do physics, ever. To put it another way, the teacher's at Ms. Bell's girls's school did not exactly warn her that she would be the only girl in class. Susanna Rustin writes, "Currently just 14% of UK engineering and technology students are female and just 7% of engineers, making the UK one of the least equal countries on this measure."
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| Denise Scott Brown in Las Vegas, c. sixties blog.archpaper.com |
These sobering numbers are reflected at the individual level. A woman in a male-dominated workplace may feel isolated, face discrimination by being excluded from networks, while male supervisors "...hire and promote in their own image." Ms. Rustin asks, "Does the lack of female representation materially affect the work produced by architects, developers, and planners? Would new housing, street and office blocks look or feel any different if more women were in charge of designing them?"
Attempting to answer her own question, Ms. Rustin introduces the readers to Wendy Davis. In the mid-eighties, Ms. Davis was among the principals of
Women's Design Service, one of the first feminist architectural design groups. As an architecture student in the seventies, Ms. Davis and her fellow female students object to the way the subject was taught. Essentially, "...You had to pin your design to the wall and everyone would have to go to you, and I really go told off for saying 'Oh yes, I hadn't thought of that.' It was very agressive and completely counter to the feminist groups that we [women] were all starting to join, that emphasised cooperation."
This method of design studio critique has not changed in the millennium. The architecture profession's machismo spurred Ms, Davis and her colleagues to band together but they faced issues over the substance of the work. Ms. Davis continues, "No one seemed to have any gender issues around design at all...The thing that's stuck with me was Le Corbusier's idea that everyone should work to a human scale, which you really can't argue with-but the figure he use to show how this worked was six feet tall! Generally speaking women are smaller and what about children?" Sounds like hair splitting to blogger but obviously important to Ms. Davis.
The WDS provides design consultations including sketches and plan drawings to groups who request it and advocate for more family-friendly public spaces. The group has also pioneered research on women's safety, publishing a pamphlet on public restrooms, "At Women's Convenience." This may sound trivial to the casual reader, but speaking as a female, the long lines to use the ladies is more than inconvenient, it is downright irritating, forcing your truly to contemplate using the gents.
The focus on sexism in the built-environment is a sticking point for contemporary women architects-the younger generation are eager to show that they have moved on. Fiona Scott says, "too much focus on sexism these days feels 'not cool.'" Architect Catherine Greig who used to rent desk space from WDS and now runs her own firm adds, "I was constantly thinking, 'It's got to be about more than toilets!'" Ms. Greig continues, "The premise of our practice is to put people at the centre-I'm thinking about gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic background, age. There are lots of groups that get marginalized...Even if cities were designed by female architects, they would still be a very narrow group."
While both Mses. Scott and Greig sympathize with the previous generation, they differ in the belief that men and women work. "If I said I'm not aware of gender in my profession I'd be lying," admits Ms. Greig. She continues, "Even when you're training, you realize this field is so male-dominated! My entire relationship as a professional was tied with the realisation that I was in the minority." Ms. Greig starting for understanding this relationship was her research into the seventies feminist adventure playgrounds. Reading about how activists fought for teenage play areas, it dawned on Ms. Greig, "how everybody can be involved in thinking about how cities are made."
Of course there professionals, of both genders, who are focused on the profit margin above all. However, both Fiona Scott and Catherine Greig are cautious about generalizations, rather, they believe that women tend to be more pragmatic then their male counterparts, have a more collaborative approach to decision making, and are better at understanding the nuances of a project. This last point is partially due to the physical differences between the gender and having specific female needs. Being marginalized professionally can accentuate an awareness of what life is like for other minority groups. "It gives you a little bit more sensitivity to what it might be like to have another vulnerability," said Liane Hartely, co-founder of the Urbanistas and runs social concern Mend. Ms. Hartely continues, "Considerate is the word, because you you can't include everyone in everything. The question is really not would cities be different if they were designed by women? It's would they be different if more voices were heard?"
Therefore, it begs the question, "what would such a city look like, and does it exist?" To answer this question, Ms. Rustin interviewed urban anthropologist Caroline Moser, who pioneered a gender-aware strategy to planning at the Development at University College London and spent most of her career doing field work in Latin American slums. Ms. Moser answered the question of what a more inclusive urban plan would look like, "This is the antithesis of the built environment, but also the most incredible space for women at different stages of life." As they amble through the Hempstead Heath, along the Ladies Bathing Pond, Ms. Moser points to the pool, referring to it as "recognition that women needed their own space." "A Room of One's Own" in three-dimensions. Ms. Moser distinguishes between practical gender needs like infant highchairs and strategic ones such as political representation. Through her field work, she learned, "you had to clearly articulate the community role of women." She also emphasizes "that the built environment means not simply buildings and public spaces but also 'the way people are in them.'"
Dolores Hayden's class 1980 essay "What Would a Non-sexist City Be Like?," called for places that would "transcend traditional definitions of home, neighbourhood, city and workplace." Since the publication of this essay, other have taken up the cause that a woman-oriented city "...would be more porous, the divisions between home and work less rigid, so that domestic acknowledged as productive activity, and carers...are less excluded from economic life. In any case, such divisions are often artificial with women in developing-world cities undertaking economic activity that has too often been ignored."
Feminists are not the only ones making the case for a radical transformation of the urban environments. Recently, the City of Sao Paolo approved a "strategic masterplan," considered by many as a model of a more inclusive and equitable design process; inspired by broad concerns surrounding growing inequality and housing needs. However, expert such as urban planner Yasminah Beebeejaun say that the gender politics of urban planning have long been underestimated. Ms. Beebeejaun argues, "that the garden city movement-which looks set to be revived in the UK with cross-party support-was conceived in part as a means of moving women out of city centres..." The single family home with gardens are something we have all be taught to aspire to but require more upkeep then apartments and more likely to result in a single-income family.
According to Caren Levy, who used to work for Caroline Moser now a professor at UCL, in many parts of the world women cannot leaven their homes by themselves without risk of harassment or worse. Prof. Levy studies transportation, an area growing concern for policymakers in light of 2012 horrific gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey. Despite the glaring evidence women must be considered in transportation planning decisions, Prof. Levy says, "gender remains at the fringe of policy debate, if it there at all: 'it's clearly very hard to talk about questions of gender if you don't talk about people in the first place and there are elements of planning that are very technocratic.'"
Is there such a thing as a feminist or minority-friendly exist? The short answer is no. However, there are places where women, children, the elderly, the disabled, sexual or ethnic minorities can thrive and are part of the decision making process. These places are far and few in between. Truthfully, no city has ever been planned and built along female or minority-friendly lines. Everything posited in this article sounds utopian and deaf to the real world urban concerns but this may change in the future. The solution lies at the early stages, training architects and planners. Like women who are encouraged to learn to code, women should also be encouraged to study the building and planning professions. Not just, the "nice" fields like interior design but architecture, architectural engineering, and planning. Girls can do physics. Second, all community stakeholders should be heard at planning and design review board meetings. Planners and architects need to design with more sensitivity to all the building's user, not just a select few. Women can build and plan; we do so with greater awareness.
Attempting to answer her own question, Ms. Rustin introduces the readers to Wendy Davis. In the mid-eighties, Ms. Davis was among the principals of
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| Women's Design Service meeting at City Hall August 2011 wds.org.uk |
This method of design studio critique has not changed in the millennium. The architecture profession's machismo spurred Ms, Davis and her colleagues to band together but they faced issues over the substance of the work. Ms. Davis continues, "No one seemed to have any gender issues around design at all...The thing that's stuck with me was Le Corbusier's idea that everyone should work to a human scale, which you really can't argue with-but the figure he use to show how this worked was six feet tall! Generally speaking women are smaller and what about children?" Sounds like hair splitting to blogger but obviously important to Ms. Davis.
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| Ladies bathing pond Hempstead Heath theguardian.com |
The focus on sexism in the built-environment is a sticking point for contemporary women architects-the younger generation are eager to show that they have moved on. Fiona Scott says, "too much focus on sexism these days feels 'not cool.'" Architect Catherine Greig who used to rent desk space from WDS and now runs her own firm adds, "I was constantly thinking, 'It's got to be about more than toilets!'" Ms. Greig continues, "The premise of our practice is to put people at the centre-I'm thinking about gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic background, age. There are lots of groups that get marginalized...Even if cities were designed by female architects, they would still be a very narrow group."
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| Jane Jacobs wnyc.org |
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| Zaha Hadid archdaily.com |
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| Lina Bo Bardi theguardian.com |
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| "What Would a Non-sexist City Be Like?" mashpedia.com |
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| Al-Wakrah Stadium Al-Wakrah, Qatar Zaha Hadid theguardian.com |
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| Women protesting sexual violence in India usilive.org |
Is there such a thing as a feminist or minority-friendly exist? The short answer is no. However, there are places where women, children, the elderly, the disabled, sexual or ethnic minorities can thrive and are part of the decision making process. These places are far and few in between. Truthfully, no city has ever been planned and built along female or minority-friendly lines. Everything posited in this article sounds utopian and deaf to the real world urban concerns but this may change in the future. The solution lies at the early stages, training architects and planners. Like women who are encouraged to learn to code, women should also be encouraged to study the building and planning professions. Not just, the "nice" fields like interior design but architecture, architectural engineering, and planning. Girls can do physics. Second, all community stakeholders should be heard at planning and design review board meetings. Planners and architects need to design with more sensitivity to all the building's user, not just a select few. Women can build and plan; we do so with greater awareness.
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