Sexism and the city: How urban planning has failed women

We could have as many children as we liked or none at all. We were promised food, shelter, education, health, employment, pension, insurance and protection. For most women, however, the new situation became a double burden of family and employment.

Hinders women’s many roles
A “zoned” city has been created, in which housing, work, shopping and entertainment are segregated into separate and distant locations. Zoning has produced two types of residential spaces. The main one involves sprawling, single-family suburbs. These are isolating, inefficient and impersonal. 

Women have been fed the aspiration of owning large individual houses, full of things for us to clean, vacuum and maintain. Much of this housing has become unaffordable, especially for single mothers or women who lack the financial support of a male partner. 

Poorer women often end up in minuscule flats in high-rise, anonymous, brutalist architecture. For the truly disadvantaged, such as homeless or battered women, few, decrepit and unsafe shelters are available.

Food deserts
What urban amenities and services are provided for women? Unless she belongs to the upper-middle class, a woman is more likely than not to live in a food desert. The term is used to describe places where there is limited access to shops that sell healthy food, and an abundance of unhealthy takeaway options.

A food desert exists where it is more than 1,600 metres to the nearest grocer, and less than that distance to the nearest takeaway shop. Doctor Thomas Astell-Burt from the University of Western Sydney has spent the last year mapping Australia’s food deserts.

“A person gets home from a hard day’s slog at work or picking up the children or looking after dependents, then it is easier, and more convenient to go to the fast-food retailer or the take away,” he said. While food deserts are found all over the city, there is a concentration of them in the suburbs.

Professor Glen Maberly, a diabetes specialist at Blacktown and Mt Druitt Hospitals, noted that someone who lives in a food desert has about two to three times the chance of having diabetes compared to the healthier areas because of the food they consume.  “If you have diabetes, the complications are heart attack, stroke, kidney disease, eye disease. So this is becoming quite prevalent and so our whole health care program is now having to gear up to better manage that,”  Professor Maberly said.

Dr Astell-Burt said although the problem was entrenched, it was solvable. “What I think we need to do is work together, meaning the health sector, the planning sector, councillors, anybody who is working in communities  to think about what are the strategies that we can use to provide people with healthier choices,”  he said.

Social 
Entertainment districts are supposed to promote a sophisticated, cosmopolitan urban culture. In reality, many are beer-based male hangouts.

Behaviours such as binge drinking, fighting, street vomiting and urination, and sexual harassment exclude women or make them feel uncomfortable.

Transportation
How about transportation spaces? In a world where women drive less than men, getting around is difficult. Extensive and congested highway systems slice across cities. The way public transport is designed cannot meet the complex travel needs of working mothers who run myriad errands throughout the day. Moreover, women risk getting crushed or groped on taxis.

Walking as a form of transport has not been made easy for women either. Tall kerbs, missing sidewalks, poorly lit alleys and short time spans of pedestrian signals disadvantage both young parents who need to push prams (which still falls mostly to women) and older people with physical impairments. As women live longer than men, they must cope with an age-unfriendly city for a longer time.

Poor lighting is a clear factor making women and girls feel vulnerable when they need to travel around the city. Women also feel more at risk in areas near to public transport.

These spaces include pedestrian walkways and bike paths. As a result, avoiding danger in these areas has become a priority for women as they move around the city.

The fear of sexual harassment in urban areas is so widespread that some studies have found girls and women regularly modify their behaviour to reduce their risk of harassment. 

Sexual harassment, as defined by the Centre Against Sexual Assault, is a crime that includes, stalking, unwanted touching, obscene gestures, voyeurism, unwanted sexual comments or jokes, sex-related insults, pressuring for dates or sex, indecent exposure, being forced to watch or participate in pornography, offensive written material and unwanted offensive and invasive interpersonal communication through electronic devices or social media.

 It is reported to affect one in ten women. But the actual figure is likely to be much higher, as more thanr 80 percent of sexual crimes against women go unreported.

To avoid being sexually assaulted, more women are staying at home rather than going out at night. When they do go out, women make meticulous decisions about their clothing and limit their movements to particular areas of the city. Many completely avoid public transport spaces. This indicates that women are internalising the message that safety from sexual harassment is solely their responsibility. 

Public transport providers perpetuate this message by advising commuters to regulate their behaviour to stay safe. Travellers are encouraged not to get into a vehicle with few passengers at night and when walking, to keep to well-lit areas.  

This advice fails to acknowledge the role of gender in public transport safety. It also causes passengers who do not feel safe to become hypersensitive to their surroundings.

The provision of CCTV cameras is important, but this may become useful only after a sexual crime has already been committed. So new approaches to safety need to be pursued. 

It is a men’s club
The planning profession is dominated by men as do other related professions such as architecture, construction, land surveying and land economics the proportion of women is much lower. 

Moreover, female planners must contend with a very male-dominated world of real estate development, politics and even planning academia. Clearly, women must operate within the same city as men, but it is more inconvenient for us.

Patriarchy in city planning is not just a failure of society, it is a failure of the imagination. So, where to from here? The “matriarchal city” is not necessarily the answer. We need to move past the notion that one group, male or female, creates the world on behalf of everyone else.

We join feminist critic Jessa Crispin in saying that, in the 21st century, we need to imagine entirely new ways of ordering our cities, neighbourhoods, streets, homes, workplaces – our very souls. Let us create a world of fraternity and cooperation. 

Childcare 

Childcare facilities are detached from both homes and workplaces. In addition to being physically inaccessible, they are too expensive for many working women.

Green space is inaccessible too, especially for low-income women living on the wrong side of town.

Sometimes parks are literally gated. Far from being “civilising” and equalising spaces, public parks have turned into sites of crime, which women are fearful to visit.

Written by:
Dorina Pojani
Senior Lecturer in Urban Planning, The University of Queensland

Dorothy Wardale
Director, Executive Education in School of Buisness and Law, Edith Cowan University

Kerry Brown
Professor of Employment and Industry, School of Business and Law, Edith Cowan University

*This article was first published by the theconversation.com and has been edited for our readers.