Literature:
Hayden, Dolores, What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like? Speculations on Housing, Urban
Design, and Human Work , Signs, 5:3 Supplement (1980:Spring) p.170
Issues Discussed;
-Suburbs are designed in a way that caused isolation for women.
Physical condition of suburbs with lack of public transportation and other services like childcare is leading the consequence of women staying at home.
-Tension between paid work and unpaid work where paid work is only recognized as value creation. (System Critique)
-Changing Spatial Arrangements are higly co-related with Changing Economic Arrangements
-Other alternatives can be presented like "Collective Housing" where the responsibilites are shared in a way. (As in the example of Sweden)
Listerborn Carina, Who speaks? And who listens? The relationship between
planners and women’s participation in local planning
in a multi-cultural urban environment, Published online: 23 February 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008
Issues Discussed;
-Communicative Action Planning and its benefits
-Idal Speech in planning (Participation of women in planning process.)
-Different Categorizations to be presented for planning and partipatory planning. Like; ethnicity, language, culture, religion, etc.
Leonie Sandercock; Ann Forsyth
A Gender Agenda: New Directions for Planning Theory
Online Publication Date: 31 March 1992
Issues Discussed;
-Women are not being included in planning process
-There are different styles of communication within the society that should be considered during decision making.
-Theory and Activism of feminist ideology should meet
-Planners are the key factor in the planning equation.
Reflection;
"We have been experiencing a speed change over the past 5 decades in terms of gender issues. The literature was focused on different approaches of gender participation to urban planning.
“The problem is paradoxical: the women cannot improve their status in the home unless their economic situation in society altered; women cannot improve their status in the labor force unless their domestic responsibilities are altered.” Says Dolore Hayden. This statement is pointing not only a space issue but also one of the main discussion point of feminist economists.
Post-war era turned women into a -so called- important labor force, where women was already creating value “in the home”. Here the Marxist-feminist economists are rising up, telling that the value can not only be evaluated by the paid hours in the market. The first time I was interested in feminist economics, I felt my brain trapped in between a system critiques and a gender fight. (Yet this might also be one of the main reasons why Marxist analysis is being found missing by some feminist economists because of not being able to present gender aspect and value created by women within the family.)
More women labor force participated to the market as paid workers, the more feminist movement turned the volume up. By the necessity of regulations in terms of gender issues, policy makers needed to raise new solutions.
What happened in London through the Nina West Homes or in Sweden via Collective Family Houses may not be counted as long term solutions considering the society perception, however these actions are pointing to a change happening as a result of a necessity within the public.
Here comes the second paradox though; In order to keep the “Family Logic” parallel to the women labor, almost all the solutions provided over the past century was somehow pointing a collective conscious. In this sense, the problem which is being caused by the capitalist system where individualism is an important dynamic, the solution is somehow pointing a “collectivity” where we can even sense the taste of socialism. As I mentioned above, if we check the history of feminism, it can clearly be seen that the movement itself was a consequence (at least an indirect effect) of growing capitalist system.
“‘‘Real engagement’’ amongst the citizens the planners want to engage, may not be noticed by the planners, because the planners remain trapped in their roles and ideals.” Says Carina Lkisterbirn in her article. That reminded me Jane Jacobs, claiming urban planners to act over planning and somehow creating a disadvantage for diversity to exist in the cities in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The issue might not be the diversity within the regions however gender factor in diversity is supporting the idea of creating suitable spaces for mingling of two different sexual identity.
Though when the thing to be discussed is the gender, it definitely requieres a challenging and complex way of planning as it mentioned in the literature;
“The place of women in the public domain is a complex
issue in planning. The feminist political struggle in recent decades has had three components: (1) claiming women’s right to be actors in the public domain and to work and participate fully in the life of the city; (2) carving out and protecting public space for women; and (3) redefining the nature and extent of the public domain. Some feminists argue that dramatic changes in metropolitan spatial structures and improvements in social and transportation policy are required to improve the opportunities for women who are also primary care-givers to participate in the political and economic life of the city. Second, feminist planners are still struggling to incorporate the issue of women’s safety into land-use planning. Third, in challenging the definition of the public domain in liberal theory, feminists have shown that liberal theory has ignored the political nature of personal life, the interconnections between gender relations in the family and the paid workplace, and the fact that socialization for citizenship occurs in the domestic realm
(Pateman 1983; Okin 1989, Hirschmann 1989).”
The women participation in the urban planning had some other dynamics like ethnicity and multiculturalism and it is claimed that even “The Swedish feminist movement, which has been successful on some other fronts, has not sufficiently managed to include immigrant women in the emancipation process
(de los Reyes 2004; Towns 2002; Knocke 1991).”’
In order to understand the portion of the local and the global perception within a neighbourhood, gender is pointed as one of the most important variable in planning in the literatures. “Women face problems of such significance in cities and society that gender can no longer be ignored in planning practice,” says Leavitt (1986, 181).
Not only the gender but the participation itself is bringing a new way of solving the problems that are claimed to be happening because of missing connection through the process of applications of the policies in the society. As it is mentioned in the literature, nowadays; especially in the Scandinavian countries where the feminist movement reached a relevant success, the participatory or deliberative democracy is started to become popular on other fields of subjects like promoting social justice and environmental sustainability.
I would like to finish my reflection with a paragraph from the literature which erases the necessity of building my own sentence to express what my opinion is: “Feminist theory, unlike more academic theories, is related to and grows out of feminist practice. Studies of both feminist planning practice and the relationship of feminist activism to planning are needed.”"
Ozge ONER
