Feminist planning
and design
Whose day does the plan imagine? Feminist approaches ask who cities and regions are built for, whose unpaid work keeps them running, and whose knowledge counts when we plan them.
Whose day? ↓Ethics of care ↓Patriarchy ↓One logic? ↓Intersectionality ↓Safety ↓Methods ↓A feminist region? ↓Theoretical framework
Methodology · Reflection
Key reading: Hayden (1980)
Whose day does the plan imagine?
Planning has long drawn its maps around one person: the commuter who leaves in the morning and returns in the evening. Many people live a different day, built around children, older relatives, a part-time job and the shopping. Both days are real work. The question is which one the plan can see.
Figure 1. Two days on one map. Day A (blue) goes to the city and back. Day B (yellow) chains seven short trips between care, work and errands; the numbers show their order. Invented example, drawn for this page.
Day A · the commuter
Two trips, both in the peak, both along the main corridor to the city. Traffic models, timetables and road budgets are built around this day.
Day B · the carer
Seven trips, mostly short, off-peak and across town, on foot, by bike or by bus. In travel surveys they are scattered over categories such as shopping, escorting and visiting, so they barely show up as care (Sánchez de Madariaga, 2013).
Sánchez de Madariaga (2013) calls the second pattern mobility of care: all the travel needed to look after other people and a household. Counted together, these trips become visible as a large share of all travel. Count them in your own region before you decide what the transport network is for.
Eighty years of asking the question
Feminist planning is older than the label. It began with women who were asked, or who demanded, to have a say in how homes and streets were built. Three of these moments are Dutch or Viennese, which makes them close to your Q3 work.
In the Netherlands, Vrouwen Adviescommissies grew into a network of more than 285 committees. Their advice shaped building codes, housing regulations and urban design, and in Rotterdam they organised model home exhibitions in the 1950s (Novas, 2022).
Dolores Hayden asked what a city would look like if it did not assume a woman at home. Suburban housing, she argued, isolated domestic work; she proposed housing with shared services (Hayden, 1980).
Leonie Sandercock and Ann Forsyth set out what gender means for planning theory, from how planners know things to whom they listen (Sandercock & Forsyth, 1992).
In Vienna, women architects led by Franziska Ullmann designed 357 homes with kitchens overlooking courtyard play areas, pram rooms by the lifts and shared laundries on the roof (Stadt Wien, n.d.).
After an eleven-year pilot with around fifty model projects, Vienna wrote gender mainstreaming into its planning routines, aiming at “fair shares in the city” for different groups of users (Damyanovic et al., 2013).
The Barcelona collective Col·lectiu Punt 6 put everyday life at the centre of planning and built its methods with residents, such as exploratory walks (Col·lectiu Punt 6, 2019).
The “fair shares” phrase is from the Vienna manual (Damyanovic et al., 2013). Note how the claims change over time: from women’s needs, to everyday life, to fair shares for many groups of users.
Key concepts
These six concepts do most of the work in feminist planning. Open each card, read the idea and its source, and answer the question for your Q3 region.
Everyday life+Plan for the routines of a day, not only for the big project.Open
The everyday is where planning succeeds or fails: the walk to school, the bench on the way, the bus that comes after the peak. Feminist urbanism puts these routines at the centre (Col·lectiu Punt 6, 2019).
Ask: Which everyday routine in your region does no plan describe?
Care+Care is everything we do to keep our world going.Open
Fisher and Tronto (1990) define caring very broadly: all the activity by which we maintain, continue and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes bodies, homes and environments.
Ask: Who maintains and repairs your region, paid and unpaid?
Mobility of care+The travel that care requires, counted as one category.Open
Escorting children, shopping for others, visiting the sick: Sánchez de Madariaga (2013) groups these trips together and shows how surveys split them up and hide them.
Ask: How would your transport proposal change if care trips were counted?
Situated knowledges+All knowledge comes from somewhere.Open
Haraway (1988) rejects the idea of a view from nowhere. Objectivity means saying where you stand and being accountable for what your position lets you see and hide.
Ask: What can you see of your region from where you stand, and what can you not?
Intersectionality+Inequalities overlap, and they add up to something new.Open
Crenshaw (1989) showed that discrimination law which looked at race or at sex separately could not see what happened to Black women. The overlap is its own position. More in Intersectionality as method.
Ask: Which residents fall between your categories?
The right to the gendered city+Belonging is lived through use, fear and daily routines.Open
Fenster (2005) argues that the right to the city is shaped by gendered experiences of belonging and of fear, in public space and at home.
Ask: Where in your region do some people not feel they belong?
The ethics of care
The ethics page gives you four lenses: consequences, duties, virtues and rights. Care ethics adds a fifth. Carol Gilligan (1982) heard in her interviews a moral voice that reasons from relationships and responsibilities rather than from abstract rights. Joan Tronto (1993) made that voice political. Care, she argues, is a public matter: who gives it, who receives it, who pays for it, and who is excused from it.
Tronto names the last group’s position privileged irresponsibility: those who can buy care, or leave it to others, never have to see it (Tronto, 1993). Later she added a fifth phase, caring with, and argued that democracy itself should be about sharing caring responsibilities (Tronto, 2013). Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) extends care to soils, materials and the non-human world, which links this page to the circular economy.
Who in your region needs care that nobody has noticed yet?
Which actor takes responsibility for meeting that need?
Who actually does the work, with what means and skills?
How do those who receive care tell you whether it works?
How are caring duties shared fairly across the whole region?
Phases 1 to 4 and their qualities after Tronto (1993); phase 5 after Tronto (2013). The questions are ours.
Do not romanticise care
Praising care without asking who does it, for how much and at what cost turns a critique into a compliment. Social reproduction theory asks how the unpaid work of making and keeping people alive props up the whole economy (Bhattacharya, 2017).
Do not care for people who did not ask
Care can slide into paternalism: planners who know best what residents need. Tronto’s fourth phase is the check. Care is only complete when those who receive it can answer back.
Care for the planet and for those not yet born
Your Q3 lenses already point here. The circular economy speaks of care for materials; doughnut economics puts the household and unpaid work inside the economy (Raworth, 2017); the just transition asks who pays. Feminist thought ties these together through care.
Dualisms
Reason over nature, man over woman, mind over body, human over animal: Plumwood (1993) shows how each pair puts the first term in charge of the second. Merchant (1980) traces how early modern science turned a living nature into a resource. Earlier ecofeminism linked women to nature (Mies & Shiva, 1993); Plumwood criticises the dualisms without that claim. Students should know the debate.
Uncounted work
Feminist political ecology shows that the work of keeping water, soil, food and households going falls unevenly by gender, class and place (Rocheleau et al., 1996). Feminist degrowth adds that a society using less energy and material will need more care, and asks who will give it (Dengler & Lang, 2022).
Maintenance
In 1969 the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote a manifesto that set maintenance against development, and proposed an exhibition called CARE (Ukeles, 1969). Planning still celebrates the new district over the repaired one. A care attitude starts from upkeep, renovation and repair.
Care across time
Future generations cannot vote, object or sit at the table. Wales has given them a legal voice: the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 requires public bodies to pursue sustainable development and set up a Future Generations Commissioner to advise and hold them to account.
Future generations as an excuse. A strategy can claim to serve the grandchildren while it displaces today’s tenants. Care for the future starts with care for those doing care work now.
Green care as women’s work. If care for the planet is coded as feminine, the old division of labour simply moves into the green economy.
Patriarchy, built
Patriarchy is the oldest word in feminist theory and the most disputed. Used loosely, it explains everything and therefore nothing. Used precisely, it tells you where to look. For Sylvia Walby, patriarchy is not a trait of individual men but a set of social structures and practices that give men power over women and over their work. She builds the concept on structures, not on men, to avoid two traps: explanations from biology, and the claim that every man oppresses every woman (Walby, 1989, 1990).
Walby distinguishes six structures. Each has a spatial form that a plan can reproduce or change. The spatial readings and questions on the cards are ours.
1 · Household production
Unpaid domestic work, taken within the household.
Housing that separates home from work and services assumes someone at home (Hayden, 1980). The London feminist design co-operative Matrix called this the man-made environment and designed alternatives with women’s groups (Matrix, 1984).
Ask: Whose unpaid work does your housing or zoning proposal assume?
2 · Paid work
Segregated and lower-paid jobs.
Firms moved routine work to regions with a reserve of women’s labour (Massey, 1984). Part-time jobs and long commutes do not combine.
Ask: Which jobs in your region can be reached within school hours?
3 · The state
Laws, policies and the institutions that make them.
Who sits on committees and who advises on plans. The Dutch Vrouwen Adviescommissies are one answer (Novas, 2022); a profession that saw itself as neutral is another (Sandercock & Forsyth, 1992).
Ask: Who decides about your region, and who only gets consulted?
4 · Male violence
Violence against women, and the fear of it.
Fear shapes where and when women go out, and so how much of the city they can use. See Safe to be in public below.
Ask: Which places and hours do people avoid, and why?
5 · Sexuality
Heterosexuality and the family as the norm.
The family home is the default unit of planning, and binary spaces such as toilets and changing rooms exclude people who do not fit them (Doan, 2010).
Ask: Which spaces in your plan assume a couple, a family or a binary body?
6 · Culture
Images, education, religion and media.
Public space tells stories about who matters: whose names are on the streets, whose figures stand on the squares.
Ask: Whose names and figures does the public space of your region honour?
Walby also describes a historical shift from private to public patriarchy. In the first, women are kept out of public life and their work is taken within the household. In the second, women enter paid work and public space, but are segregated and kept in subordinate positions there (Walby, 1990). That is a fair description of the Netherlands today, where most women are in paid work and a large share of them work part-time (Eurostat, 2024). The question is no longer whether women are in public space, but on what terms. Space itself does part of this work: Spain (1992) shows how the separation of women and men in homes, schools and workplaces kept women from knowledge that carried status.
Is patriarchy an explanation or a label? Pollert (1996) objects that the word is often used both to describe inequality and to explain it, which makes the argument circular. She argues that gender should be studied inside all social relations, case by case. hooks (1984) warned that a single story of male domination hides how race and class divide women. Our advice: use the word when you can name the structure and the place where it operates. Otherwise, describe the mechanism.
Whether patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism form one system is the debate in the next section.
Four systems, one logic?
Many feminist scholars see a common thread running through patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism and the destruction of the planet for profit. The thread is appropriation: taking what has been defined as having no value, such as care, nature, and colonised land and bodies. It explains why the same places and the same people so often carry the costs.
Mies (1986)
Capital accumulation has always relied on two unpaid inputs: women’s domestic labour and the land and labour of colonised peoples. One process, two faces.
Federici (2004)
The witch hunts and the enclosures disciplined women’s bodies and reproductive work in the same period that colonial expansion began.
Lugones (2007)
Colonialism did more than use existing gender systems: it imposed a binary, hierarchical gender order on colonised societies.
Moore (2015); Patel & Moore (2017)
Capitalism grows by making nature, food, energy, labour and care cheap, so that it can take them without paying their full cost.
Different histories
Patriarchy is far older than capitalism (Lerner, 1986). A single story hides how capitalism has both used and weakened male control, depending on what markets needed.
Not only profit
State socialist economies also destroyed ecosystems on a vast scale (Josephson et al., 2013). The shared driver may be an ideology of production and growth, with or without profit.
All or nothing
If four systems are one, the only answer is to overthrow everything at once. Planners need levers: a land policy, a care facility, an energy cooperative, a seat at the table.
Nancy Fraser (2022) offers a formulation that keeps the common thread and the differences. The economy we count, she argues, depends on background conditions it does not pay for in full: care, nature, wealth expropriated from racialised and colonised peoples, and public power. It devours them while depending on them. Each system keeps its own history, and the planner gets a question to ask of any strategy: which background conditions does it rely on, and who pays for them?
Figure 2. The economy we count rests on four conditions it does not fully pay for. Our drawing, after Fraser (2022).
Agree or disagree: patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism and ecological destruction are one system.Think first, then open +
There is no single right answer. Use at least one source from each list above, and test your answer against one concrete place in your Q3 region.
Which background condition does your regional strategy rely on most, and who pays for it?Think first, then open +
Look at energy (nature), housing and services (care), labour and land (expropriation) and the state budget (public power). Name the group that carries the cost, then say what your strategy gives back.
Intersectionality as method
Intersectionality comes from Black feminist thought and law. Crenshaw (1989) named it in a critique of discrimination law. Two years later she showed what it means for violence and for services. Women of colour who were abused met laws, shelters and campaigns designed around other women. Services did not work for women with limited English, and immigration rules could keep women in violent marriages (Crenshaw, 1991). Collins (2000) widened the idea into a matrix of domination, in which power works at the same time through structures such as law and markets, through rules and bureaucracies, through ideas and images, and through everyday interaction.
In planning, Beebeejaun (2017) argues that gender is still neglected in urban theory, and that work on the right to the city says little about how rights are gendered. Attention to everyday life, and to the tactics of residents at the margins, reveals a city of contested publics. For a methodology course the question is practical: how do you build intersectionality into a research design? McCall (2005) describes three approaches. Each one leads to different data and methods.
Question the categories+Anticategorical: Treat categories such as ‘migrant’, ‘resident’ or ‘household’ as made, not given, and ask what they simplify (McCall, 2005).Open
In your Q3 project: Trace how one category in your data was defined, by whom and since when.
Go deep into one position+Intracategorical: Study one group at a neglected point of intersection, usually in depth and with qualitative methods (McCall, 2005).Open
In your Q3 project: Choose one group your averages hide and design interviews or a walk with them.
Compare between groups+Intercategorical: Use existing categories strategically to measure inequalities between groups at their intersections, usually with quantitative data (McCall, 2005).Open
In your Q3 project: Split one indicator by two categories at once, for example gender and age, and compare. Aggregate small groups before you publish.
Categories are political
In 2022 Statistics Netherlands stopped dividing the population by ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ migration background and introduced a classification by country of birth and of origin (CBS, 2022). Wekker (2016) argues that a Dutch self-image of tolerance makes racism hard to name. Before you split your data, check which categories it uses, since when, and what they cannot show.
Not a checklist
Collins and Bilge (2016) treat intersectionality as an analytic tool built on six ideas: social inequality, power, relationality, social context, complexity and social justice. More columns in a table are not intersectional unless you ask how power produces the differences.
Bodies the plan assumes away
Intersectionality also brings in people that standard design does not imagine: disabled people, and trans and nonbinary people for whom binary spaces become places of exclusion (Doan, 2010). See Travelling while trans.
Safe to be in public
Safety is where feminist planning meets the street most directly, and where its arguments are most often turned against other groups. Start with what the research found.
Women’s fear concentrates on public space and on strangers. Most violence against women, however, is committed by men they know, often at home (Pain, 1991; Valentine, 1989). The fear is still real, and it has spatial effects: women avoid places and hours, and those tactics shrink the city they can use. Valentine (1989) read this as patriarchy working through space. More recent work treats sexual harassment as an attack on the right to everyday life (Boyer, 2022).
of women and of men in the Netherlands reported sexually transgressive behaviour in the previous twelve months in 2024. For 8% of all respondents it was sexual intimidation offline (CBS, 2024).
Sexual intimidation in public space and online became a criminal offence in the Netherlands, with up to three months in prison or a fine of up to €10,300 (NL Times, 2024, 2026).
in two years of a pilot in seven municipalities with trained enforcement officers. Officers had to witness the behaviour three times before they could write a report (NL Times, 2026). A law alone does not make a street safe.
Transport is where much of this happens. A survey of about 15,000 students in 18 cities on six continents, coordinated from KTH and UCLA, studied sexual harassment on public transport (KTH, n.d.). The editors of the resulting book note that in many cities, especially in the Global South, women depend on public transport and cannot choose another way to travel (Ceccato & Loukaitou-Sideris, 2020).
Four answers to fear. Each one has a cost. Open them before you put one in your strategy.
More light, better design+Lighting, sightlines, signage and maintained routes.Open
Women’s safety audits regularly recommend such changes: better lighting and signage, redesigned paths, transit stops and station exits (Women in Cities International, 2008).
Watch out: Design cannot change who harasses, or why.
More cameras, more police+Surveillance as protection.Open
This is the most common answer, and the most contested. Kern (2020) shows how calls for safety can bring more surveillance and policing, which make other groups less safe: racialised, homeless or trans people.
Watch out: Ask whose safety the measure produces, and whose it reduces.
More people, more activity+Presence as safety.Open
Mixed uses, staffed stations, frequent transport in the evening and places that stay open make a route feel inhabited. This reading is ours, and it is test 6 in ‘A feminist region?’ below.
Watch out: Activity can also mean displacement, if it comes with rising rents.
More rights+The right to be in public for no reason.Open
Phadke, Khan and Ranade (2011) argue that women in Mumbai need the right to loiter: to be in public for pleasure and to take risks, instead of protection that keeps them at home. Home, they point out, is not safe either.
Watch out: The right to be in public is not shared equally by caste, class, religion, age, disability or sexuality.
The women’s safety audit was created in Toronto in 1989 by METRAC, a group working against violence against women and children. Local women who use a space walk it with a checklist, record what makes them feel unsafe, report to the authorities and follow up on what is done (Women in Cities International, 2008). In 2010 UNIFEM, now part of UN Women, launched a Safe Cities programme with Quito, Cairo, New Delhi, Port Moresby and Kigali (UN Non-Governmental Liaison Service, 2010).
Try it: audit one route in your region at dusk, using the exploratory walk in Methods and the forms on the Subjective mapping page. Walk in a group, keep participants safe, and never publish the location of a shelter or of any person. Check the ethics page first.
Feminist methods for your region
Feminist planning changes what you measure and how you collect it. These six methods work at the regional scale and fit the Q3 schedule. The Toolkit has many more.
Exploratory walk+Walk a route with residents and let them lead.Open
Choose a route that matters for daily life: from a bus stop to a school, or through a station at dusk. Walk it with a small group of residents, ideally of different ages and genders. Stop where they stop; note what they say about light, distances, toilets, benches and how safe it feels. Col·lectiu Punt 6 (2019) built much of its practice on such walks.
Watch out: Walking with residents is research with people: check consent and data rules on the ethics page first.
Time-use diary+Ask people to record a day, hour by hour.Open
Give a few residents a simple sheet: where were you, doing what, for whom, how did you get there? Draw their days as paths in space and time, the way Hägerstrand (1970) proposed for regional science. Gaps, waiting and detours become visible.
Watch out: Diaries are personal data. Keep them anonymous and ask only what you need.
Care-trip map+Map the trips that care requires.Open
Combine survey categories such as escorting, shopping and visiting into one layer: mobility of care (Sánchez de Madariaga, 2013). Then compare its routes and hours with the bus network and its timetable.
Watch out: Check how your data source defines its categories before you add them up.
Data split by group+Never accept an average without asking: whose average?Open
Ask for data split by gender, age, disability and origin, as the Vienna manual demands for every planning task (Damyanovic et al., 2013). Where categories overlap, look at the overlaps too (Crenshaw, 1989).
Watch out: Small groups can be re-identified. Aggregate before you publish.
Care-chain map+Draw who cares for whom, and where they live.Open
Pick three households and map their care relations across the region: a parent in a care home in another town, a child minded by a grandparent, a neighbour who shops for someone. The map shows which distances and services hold the region together. This method is our adaptation for the studio.
Watch out: Ask permission for every relation you draw, and leave out names.
Positionality statement+Say where you stand before you say what you found.Open
Write a short paragraph on who you are in relation to your region: what you can see easily, what you may miss, and how you tried to correct for it (Haraway, 1988; Rose, 1997). Rose warns that full self-knowledge is impossible; aim for honesty, not a confession.
Watch out: Put it in your methodology chapter, and come back to it in your individual reflection.
Feminist planning, criticised from within
The strongest critiques of feminist planning come from feminists. Use them to sharpen your own argument.
Which women?
Early feminist planning often spoke of “women” as one group with shared needs. bell hooks (1984) showed how mainstream feminism spoke from the position of white, middle-class women. Begin with intersectionality, not with a correction at the end.
A checklist without politics
Gender mainstreaming can become an expert routine that never asks who holds power. Walby (2005) describes the tension between mainstreaming as an expert, bureaucratic tool and as a way to bring more people into decisions.
Safety or surveillance?
Calls for safer streets can end in more cameras and more policing, which make other groups less safe. Kern (2020) discusses this tension. Ask what kind of safety a proposal produces, and for whom. See Safe to be in public.
Who counts as a body?
A feminist page that assumes two sexes repeats the mistake it criticises. Trans and nonbinary people meet the same systems at every step: see Travelling while trans.
Snow clearing in Karlskoga, Sweden, is one of the most repeated stories in feminist planning. Would you cite it in your report?Think first, then open +
The story is retold on many websites and was popularised by Criado Perez (2019). Before you cite it, trace the chain: who first made the claim, on what data, and has anyone evaluated the policy since? Many retellings cite each other rather than the original evidence. This is a good test for any planning anecdote.
Is a feminist plan simply a good plan with a new label?Think first, then open +
A label changes nothing. A feminist approach should change what gets measured, who decides and whose work counts. If your strategy looks exactly the same after the tests below, the label is decoration.
Can men be feminists?
Students of every gender will use the methods on this page, and many of the people who plan and govern regions are men. So the question is practical as well as theoretical. It is also old: in the 1980s it gave its title to a collection of essays, Men in Feminism (Jardine & Smith, 1987). The answer depends on what you think feminism is: an identity, an experience or a politics. Three answers, from feminists themselves:
Yes: feminism is a politics+What you do counts, not who you are.Open
hooks (2000) defines feminism as a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression, not as a movement of women against men. Earlier she argued that men are the main agents who keep sexism going, so it cannot end unless men take responsibility for changing themselves and society. Men are not oppressed by sexism, but they do suffer from it, and those who oppose it belong in the movement (hooks, 1984).
So: A man’s feminism is judged by his practice: in the studio, at home, in the plan.
Yes, as allies who listen+Speaking with, not speaking for.Open
Alcoff (1991) shows that speaking for others can reproduce the very hierarchy it criticises. She asks who is speaking, from where, and with what effects. Harding (1991) argues that men can produce feminist knowledge, but only by learning to start their thinking from women’s lives. That standpoint is achieved through work; it is not given.
So: In your project, design processes in which residents speak for themselves (see Methods).
Only with an honest account+Benefits do not disappear when you change your mind.Open
Connell (1995) observes that most men do not live up to the dominant ideal of masculinity, yet still gain from the gender order: the patriarchal dividend. Calling yourself a feminist does not cancel it. Tronto’s privileged irresponsibility, in the ethics of care, names one of its forms: being free to leave care to others.
So: The test is what you share or give up: time, care, space, the floor in a meeting.
Institutions now invite men in. UN Women launched HeForShe on 20 September 2014 to enlist men and boys as active supporters of gender equality (UN Women, 2014). Test such campaigns with Connell’s question: do they change structures, or only attitudes?
Keep a time-use diary for one week (see Methods). Who does the care that makes your studying possible?
In workshops, facilitate rather than present, speak last, and record disagreement instead of smoothing it out.
Who gains time, space and money from your strategy, and who carries its costs?
Put what you found in your positionality statement and in your individual reflection.
A team of men writes a regional strategy that passes all seven tests in ‘A feminist region?’. Is it a feminist strategy?Think first, then open +
Judge the plan by what it changes and by how it was made. If carers and women in the region shaped it, and it moves time, money and power towards care, it does feminist work. Who wrote it matters for the process (Alcoff, 1991), but it does not settle the question on its own (hooks, 2000).
A feminist region?
Most feminist urbanism works at the scale of the street and the neighbourhood. Your studio works at the scale of the region, which is a gap in the literature you can help to fill. Doreen Massey gives you a starting point. In Spatial Divisions of Labour she showed how firms moved routine work to regions with a reserve of women’s labour, so regional economic geography was gendered from the start (Massey, 1984). She developed the argument in Space, Place and Gender (Massey, 1994).
We propose seven tests. They are our synthesis of this page, written as questions you can ask of your own regional strategy.
Is the region served off-peak and across town, and not only towards the city at 8 am?
Do schools, clinics, childcare and care homes appear next to grids and motorways? Their everyday role is the theme of the foundational economy (Foundational Economy Collective, 2018).
Are travel time, waiting time and time-use measured, as Hägerstrand (1970) proposed for regional science?
Does the economic strategy see unpaid work? In 2023, 27.9% of employed women in the EU worked part-time, and the Netherlands is among the three countries with the highest share of mothers working part-time (Eurostat, 2024).
Are those who give care represented where the region decides? The Vrouwen Adviescommissies are a Dutch precedent (Novas, 2022). See the polder model on the governance page.
Is safety pursued through presence, activity and good transport, and are data split by gender, age, disability and origin? See Safe to be in public.
Does the strategy maintain and renovate what exists before it builds new (Ukeles, 1969)?
Run your Q3 strategy through the seven tests. For each, give a yes, a partly or a no, with one sentence of evidence. Then write two sentences for your report: one thing your strategy assumes about care, and one thing it would change because of this page.
A reading path
Six texts, in a suggested order. Open each one for a short summary, why it matters for Q3, and a link. Ask the TU Delft library if a book is not freely available.
1 · Start+Hayden (1980)What would a non-sexist city be like?Article · Signs, 1980The suburb assumed a woman at home. What if it did not?Open for a summary and link
Hayden argues that the American suburb, with its single-family homes far from work and services, was built on the assumption of a woman at home doing unpaid domestic work. She proposes a different model of housing with shared services such as childcare and meals, so that home and work no longer have to be separated.
Why read it: The founding text. Read it to see how a housing type carries an idea of who does the care.
Read the article →2 · Then+Kern (2020)Feminist cityBook · accessible introductionHow cities are built around a default male life.Open for a summary and link
The geographer Leslie Kern mixes research and her own experience to show how cities are built around a default male life. She looks at the city through motherhood, friendship, being alone, protest and fear, and asks what a feminist city could be.
Why read it: The easiest way in. Good for your theoretical framework and for the critique of safety and surveillance.
Publisher page →3 · Practice+Col·lectiu Punt 6 (2019)Urbanismo feministaBook in Spanish · free PDFEveryday life at the centre, residents as experts.Open for a summary and link
A Barcelona collective of architects, planners and sociologists sets out its approach: put everyday life at the centre of planning, and build knowledge with residents. The book combines a critique of the city with methods such as exploratory walks and participatory diagnoses.
Why read it: The methods book. Use it to design your exploratory walk.
Book page and PDF →4 · Ethics+Tronto (1993)Moral boundariesBook · political theoryCare as a political question, not a women’s virtue.Open for a summary and link
Tronto challenges the idea that care is a ‘women’s morality’. She argues that care is one of the central activities of human life, and that society downgrades it to protect the power of the privileged. She defines four phases of care and the moral qualities each requires.
Why read it: The source for the care section above. Start with the chapter that sets out the phases of care.
Publisher page →5 · Theory+Fraser (2022)Cannibal capitalismBook · critical theoryCapitalism feeds on what it does not pay for.Open for a summary and link
Fraser argues that capitalism is more than an economy: it is a social order that depends on care, nature, expropriated wealth and public power, and consumes them. She links the crises of care, ecology, democracy and racial injustice to this one structure.
Why read it: The basis for ‘Four systems, one logic?’ above. Test her argument against your region.
Publisher page →6 · Region+Massey (1994)Space, place and genderBook · essays in geographyPlaces are made by social relations, and these are gendered.Open for a summary and link
Massey collects essays arguing that space and place are made by social relations, and that these relations are gendered. Her ‘global sense of place’ treats a place as a meeting point of wider connections, not a bounded container.
Why read it: The bridge to the regional scale. Use it with the seven tests in ‘A feminist region?’.
Publisher page →The texts behind this page
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