Contentious Cities

Design and the Gendered Production of Space

Jess Berry, Timothy Moore, Nicole Kalms, Gene Bawden, Jess Berry, Timothy Moore, Nicole Kalms, Gene Bawden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000226836
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Contentious Cities offers unique interdisciplinary approaches to understanding gendered spatial equity in the urban environment. Positioning design as a central component in how cities produce, construct, represent and materialise gendered spatial practices, it brings together practice and theory to critique, question and enable solutions that challenge the root causes of gender inequalities in cities. Through a rich array of case-studies, practice-led interventions, and historical and theoretical perspectives, it examines important issues that affect the ways in which women, and people of diverse gender and sexual identities experience and participate in cities. Thematically organised, it considers problems of street-harassment, heterosexualisation and equity in access and mobility, together with modes of segregation, isolation and discrimination, as well as processes of resistance, intervention and agency.

Grounded in feminist and queer methods of analysis, the book offers new insights regarding the representation of cities, the lived experience of cities, and how design-tactics and approaches might affect the ways cities shape and regulate how women and people of diverse gender and sexual identity inhabit, occupy and move through the city. An examination of the ways in which design might shift toward safer and more inclusive cities, Contentious Cities will appeal to scholars of sociology, gender studies and urban studies, as well as those working in the fields of urban planning and design.

1 Introduction
Contentious cities

Jess Berry with Timothy Moore, Nicole Kalms, and Gene Bawden

Cities are sites of contention, in which competing rights, politics, cultures, and identities are constantly negotiated. Inclusive, participatory, safe, and accessible cities are recognised as a cornerstone of sustainable urban development. However, freedom to move in and around cities with equity in order to access opportunities for employment, education, political mobilisation, and social and cultural services is curtailed for many people due to multiple forms of discrimination and violence (United Nations Development Program 2015). The ability to access the city freely, to act with agency, and feel a sense of belonging are human rights often denied for women, girls, and people identifying across the diverse spectrum of gender and sexuality in countries across the globe (Campkin 2019; Shaw et al. 2019). Issues of gendered inequality in urban space stem from persistent power differentials that permeate economic, political, cultural, and legal urban structures, with effects that range from the subtly symbolically violent (Bourdieu 2001) to the openly physically violent.

Design as a cultural and social practice contributes to the production and reproduction of power relations within cities, as well as to the construction, representation, and materialisation of gendered spatial practices. Recent feminist and queer scholarship in urban planning and policy has demonstrated the need to apply a gendered lens to understandings of the built environment, and the ways in which persistent inequalities in everyday lived realities are perpetuated (Jarvis, Kantor and Cloke 2009; Madariaga and Roberts 2013; Peake and Rieker 2013). While all genders are impacted by prevailing norms of social power, it is clear that for women as a group, and LGBTQI+ people as a group, freedom of access and agency within cities is typically more restricted than is the case for men as a group. As recent studies in urban planning and design attest, in working towards equitable access to cities, regardless of age, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, immigration status, or disability, the enhancement of women’s safety in cities improves safety for all (Shaw et al. 2013). Though, arguably, broadening this remit to include vulnerabilities across the spectrum of gender and sexual diversity may well achieve the same goals (Campkin 2019).

Progressive urban planners, policy makers, architects, and designers have developed a range of approaches and practices to address issues of safety, access, and agency in urban environments. For example, ‘gender mainstreaming’ is the process of assessing the implications of legislation, policy, programs, and planning for both women and men to ensure that access to city spaces will benefit all genders equally. This approach requires design tools such as gender auditing, which invites participants to use a space and report on factors that make them feel unsafe, thus providing insights into the lived experiences of marginalised groups (Shaw et al. 2013; Zibell, Damyanovic and Sturm 2019). ‘Gender-sensitive’ design builds on this approach and attempts to reconcile the differing needs of people of diverse genders, ages, abilities, and ethnicities, in order to make visible and challenge power differentials. For example, caring and household work are treated as equal to paid employment, and the structures and facilities required for both are examined. Crucial to this approach is participatory stakeholder engagement in visioning what could be different in the future, and to allow for propositions that break with design precedents (Roberts 2018). ‘Gender-inclusive’ urban planning and design builds on these approaches to incorporate cross-sector strategies, typologies, and fields of expertise to integrate participatory engagement with community and government project partners in developing built environments that meet the needs of all people, regardless of age, ability, ethnicity, race, income, class, sexuality, and gender identity (World Bank Group 2020).

A range of architecture and design practices have similarly advocated for more inclusive built environments and public spaces that attend to the needs of women and people of diverse gender and sexual identities (Kalms 2017; Darling and Walker 2019). For example, Feminist Futures of Spatial Practice (Shalk, Kristansson and Mazé 2017) outlines a range of feminist approaches, such as: critical mapping as a mode of situated, experiential, social practice; reparative practices that move past the constraints of patriarchal, modernist aesthetics; and alternatives to city vision making. Practices of queering architecture have similarly sought to develop gender-inclusive frameworks for making cities feel safer. These include strategies to: retain queer ‘safe’ spaces in cities undergoing urban development (Goh 2018); create spaces that are non-binary, and questioning of cisnormative systems of power (Castricum 2017); and engaging with deviant aesthetic approaches of non-conformity outside heteronormative barriers of taste (Furman 2019).

Despite these approaches, the prevalence of everyday sexism, harassment, and unequal power balance in our cities makes it clear that there continues to be critical currency in examining the multitude of ways that design contributes to, or resists, these norms. Recognising that the design of cities is not only a problem of urban planning, this edited collection brings together interdisciplinary approaches to examining the representation of cities and the lived experience of cities, along with design practices and approaches that might redress inequality in the city. Design practitioners and scholars in dialogue with criminology, psychology, sociology, geography, media, and gender studies here aim to further investigate the gendered production of space and how this influences experience and participation in cities. Through an examination of design-led tactics coupled with feminist and queer methods of analysis, the diverse case studies presented in this volume offer new thinking regarding the ways in which the design of urban space influences power relations between diverse genders and sexual identities, and how these spaces might shift towards safer and more inclusive cities.

It is well established that feelings of fear and unsafety in the city curtail marginalised people’s ability to access public space (Valentine 1989; Pain 1991; Namaste 1996; Mehta 1999; Corteen 2002; Browne, Bakshi and Lim 2011). Overt experiences of physical and verbal gender-based violence are significant deterrents to accessing the city freely and adversely shape women’s and gender-diverse people’s behaviours in these spaces. This situation is further complicated by heterosexist symbolic violence; some of the chapters in this book explain the impact of spatial practices that perpetuate pornographication (Tyler and Coy), sexist and racist objectification (Larin), colonial patterns of disregard and self-regard (Bawden and Martin), and homogenisation of normative gender assertions (Maher and Gayo). All these factors have the power to orient attitudes, behaviours, and experiences within public space.

To make cities feel safer and more equitable for everyone, the spaces and conditions where gendered bias, sexism, harassment, and violence are perpetuated need to be exposed and understood through the amplification of diverse and under-represented voices. A number of chapters in this book engage directly with the lived experiences of people who identify across diverse gender and sexual orientation positions. Through these narratives, experiences of street harassment (Fileborn), queer occupation of urban space (Tooth Murphy), and the negotiation of gendered public spaces (Marshall) provide insights into the need for designers and architects to design for gender diversity. Importantly, the authoritative voices of these oral histories, embodied geographies, and lived experiences also provide narratives of resistance, agency, and activist practices of reclaiming and occupying the city. Further examples of these activist practices are explored through the appropriation of public spaces by migrant and trans workers (Balaoro and Bedir), the performative acts of marching, walking, and dancing the city (Berry), and place-based queering processes (Yeros).

In particular, this book contends that radical design practice has a significant role to play in re-shaping the city towards experiences of safety and inclusion for diverse peoples. These include processes such as: transforming the briefing process to take into account gender-diverse experiences (Moore and Castricum); gender-sensitive co-design that engages with the lived experiences of women, girls, and gender-diverse communities (Kalms and Bawden); adopting gender-mainstreaming approaches to urban mobility systems and infrastructures (Harumain, McDonagh, Woodcock, Nordin, and Faiz) developing planning frameworks for non-sexist cities (Lloyd); and developing queer pedagogies for the education of future architects and designers (Vallerand).

One of the challenges in striving to include perspectives from a diverse range of people is understanding who is left out. Contributions from the global south, Indigenous scholars, and non-western perspectives are relatively few in the overall schema of the book. As such, there are significant omissions with regard to the experiences of women and people of diverse gender and sexual orientations that occupy these places and positions. Interested readers in urban theory might turn to Building Inclusive Cities: Women’s Safety and Right to the City (Whitzman et al., 2013) for a range of planning and policy perspectives from the global south. Further, recent studies regarding Indigenous approaches to place making in urban environments offer important insights regarding the potential for transforming oppressive social structures, and informing a sense of belonging in cities (McGaw, Pieris and Potter 2011; Go-Sam and Keys 2019; Nejad, Walker and Newhouse 2019). From these significant and diverse perspectives, amongst others, it is clear that gender-inclusive approaches must also take into account multi-dimensional experiences of cities, in order to comprehend the complex and nuanced needs of many gender-diverse people. Intersectional theories, methods, and practices explicitly take into account individual and differing accounts of lived experiences in cities, and how these lived experiences shape oppression as well as privilege (Crenshaw 1989; Bacchi and Evelin 2009; Tankel 2011). Undoubtedly, there is still much work to do in the design disciplines to enable intersectional design practice and scholarship to come to the fore (Boehnert and Onafuwa 2016).

The project and structure

This edited collection was conceived by members of Monash University’s XYX Lab, a research group that addresses the complex intersections of space, gender, and identity through design practice. The central aim of the XYX Lab is to understand how the gendering of space limits participation in cities. Through the use of strategic design processes such as co-design, mapping, tactical walking, and material making, the Lab seeks to surface gendered experiences of spatial inequity in order to amplify diverse and under-represented voices in processes of urban planning, policy, and social services. Recognising that the XYX Lab’s research coalesces with the work of many other designers, urban geographers, sociologists, criminologists, and gender studies experts, we invited our world-wide collaborators to engage in dialogue around the complex and multi-faceted problems of addressing issues of gendered spatial equity in the urban environment.

The result of this collaboration was a three-day intensive symposium, consisting of a series of workshops applying XYX Lab’s co-design, design thinking, and material-making approaches to interrogate the central themes of the book. From these action-led thinking, making, and doing probes, participants engaged in rich discussions regarding issues such as concepts of safety in public space, visibility in the city, the [im]possibilities of inclusion/exclusion, and the ambiguities of queering space. Writing prompts further asked participants to interrogate their biases and assumptions while critically reflecting on contentious issues in their research. These collaborative workshops are presented throughout this book as a series of interstitial visual essays. Comprising photographs and short descriptions, these visual essays titled ‘Collaboration in Action,’ ‘Write Now,’ ‘The [Un]Built,’ and ‘Co-design Cover’ demonstrate co-design practices at work.

It is clear that constructs of gender are also contentious spaces. Gender identity, assignation, embodiment, expression, and role are complex facets of individual, cultural, and social categories. The editors take the position that ‘women’ are not a homogenous group and represent enormous diversity in cultural background, socio-economic status, where they live, their sexuality, disability, and age. The term ‘women’ is used as inclusive of all women, including cis-women, trans-women, and intersex women. Similarly, terms such as non-binary, gender fluid, or diverse gender identities are used to recognise the experiences of people who do not necessarily identify as male or female. Sexual orientation and identity are also complex designations and terms such as ‘LGBTQI+’ and ‘queer’ do not necessarily capture the diversity of experiences, interests, and perspectives of individual people or communities. The editors recognise and respect that individual authors may use these terms in different and sometimes conflicting ways to the volume editors, and to each other, and that each of the contributors to this book hold nuanced theoretical perspectives regarding these terminologies. Some of these terminologies are explored in the ‘Glossary of Contention.’ This list of definitions compiled by the contributing authors provides insights into the dynamic complexity of how these terms reflect underlyi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: contentious cities
• 2 Colonial imaginaries reimagined
• Visual essays overview: 01 Collaboration in action
• Part One Sex on the streets
• Part Two Histories of the gendered city
• Part Three The trouble with queer spaces
• Glossary of contention
• Index