fiction
riding the bus, in a man's world
design and planning interventions striving to make public space more inclusive
"Women was regarded as a creature whose boundaries are unstable, whose power to control them is inadequate. Deformation attends her. She swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she perforates, she disintegrates. [...] Think of the monsters of Greek myth, who are mostly women with deranged boundaries, like Skylla, Medusa, the Sirens, the Harpies, the Amazons, the Sphinx. [...] In order to achieve form or consistency, the female must submit herself to the regulation and articulation of the male." - Anne Carson [1].
The poet Anne Carson offers a sardonic take on the "boundaries" of the female; in reality, women have indeed, historically occupied clearly bound spaces, staying behind the threshold of the domestic as the cosmopolitan sphere remained governed and inhabited by men. Despite progress in some metrics toward increased enfranchisement for women, urban space remains dichotomized, both in the popular imagination (through entrenched cultural tropes), and in our lived reality (through spaces we occupy and social norms we live by), into men's spaces and women's spaces (or more broadly, non-male spaces). Interior or domestic space continues to be predominantly female; as one example of how this plays out in society, women comprise 68% of interior design practitioners according to the IIDA [2], while women comprised 24.9% of architects in 2021, according to NCARB [3].
As cities, particularly in mid-century America, embraced the automobile, female-coded and male-coded spaces became even more geographically disparate, bridged by a commute that relied on the automobile and its fossil fuels. However, cities like Bogotá and Paris are taking steps to support more diverse land use within neighborhoods, emphasizing walkability and short travel distances between services. These cities' initiatives to integrate walkable social infrastructure for residents breaks down the historically rigid boundaries between the domestic and cosmopolitan spheres, driving progress at the intersection of feminism and environmentalism.
Bogotá: Care Blocks
In Bogotá, many economically disadvantaged women are full-time caregivers and suffer economically and physically as a result [4]. Bogotá introduced an initiative called Care Blocks to mitigate the negative effects that caregiving responsibilities have on women. Bogotá's Care Blocks incorporate care-giving resources into existing infrastructure such as parks and schools, to support improved economic, educational, and health outcomes for women. Bogotá's former mayor, Claudia Lopez, discussed the Care Blocks at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023 [5], highlighting the importance of integrating services for caregivers into pre-existing civic infrastructure, pointing out that this infrastructure is often designed for children but does not consider the needs of the mother. When caregiving services are centralized, women have more free time to engage with the cosmopolitan public sphere by pursuing education and entrepreneurship. As the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OPSI) notes, "the Care Blocks have put women at the center of Bogotá's urban transformation and future planning." [6].
Paris: Hidalgo deploys the 15-Minute City concept
Carlos Moreno, an urbanist at Paris' Sorbonne University, who is well-known for the 15-Minute City concept, describes the automobile's role in exacerbating the divisions between gendered spaces in his book, The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet. Moreno notes that in post-war America, expressways cut through cities like "long wounds, and the car became the center of our (masculine) desires, and the center of urban life." [7]. Moreno describes rigidly divided urban zones, (a strategy that Le Corbusier supported), as creating a "triple segregation" [8], in which cities are divided across multiple demographic markers, such as socioeconomic status, race, and gender. Moreno's proposal to heal the "wounds" created by car-centric design, by promoting walkable cities with diverse uses, has been deployed by Paris' mayor Anne Hidalgo. Paris, like Bogotá, has capitalized on existing infrastructure such as schoolyards and nurseries; Paris expanded the use of these facilities after hours to function as recreational community hubs, according to WRI [9]. Integrating this type of social infrastructure into neighborhoods blurs the division between domestic and cosmopolitan space, making the public space of the city more accessible and inviting to diverse user groups, and reducing the need for vehicular transportation.
Global progress: Melbourne, Milan, United States
Cities globally are pursuing similar urban strategies at the crux of inclusion and sustainability; Melbourne introduced a plan for 20-minute neighborhoods [10], and Milan's Piazze Aperte plan aims to pedestrianize areas within neighborhoods and create walkable social spaces [11]. Further, at the level of individual structures, it has become increasingly common in the US, particularly following the FAM Act (2017) [12, 13], to see pre-fabricated lactation pods in airports, (for example, by Mamava) [14]. In this instance, a prefabricated solution allows existing building stock to be upgraded to meet present-day societal expectations, while minimizing on-site construction waste and reducing disruption to operations during the retrofit.
As cities create space for women- the "creature whose boundaries are unstable", to quote poet Anne Carson- public space becomes more inclusive, and transportation routes become more efficient and less carbon-intensive: a win-win for society and sustainability.
1- https://www.best-poems.net/anne-carson/women.html
2 - https://iida.org/articles/perspective-access-talk-talk-delineating-diversity
3 - https://www.ncarb.org/nbtn2022/demographics
4 - https://oecd-opsi.org/innovations/bogota-care-blocks/
5 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY7FQrQt4lE&list=PL2J3c5AtY5K9xkBAKWia6hutRvWC4Nsey&index=6
7 - Moreno, Carlos. The 15-Minute City: A Solution for Saving Our Time & Our Planet. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2024.
9 - https://www.wri.org/insights/paris-15-minute-city
10 - https://www.planning.vic.gov.au/guides-and-resources/strategies-and-initiatives/plan-melbourne
11 - Moreno, Carlos. The 15-Minute City: A Solution for Saving Our Time & Our Planet. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2024.
12 - https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/1110/text
14 - https://www.mamava.com/all-products/original-mamava-lactation-pod