Frontline ·
A city of her own
A feminist vision of architecture and urban planning would replace domination and hierarchy with participation and care as its guiding principles to create a space that can be considered truly democratic.
On August 22, while speaking with a young woman at a political meeting for women students in Pune, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, commented that “roads are controlled by patriarchy… businesses are controlled by patriarchy, the school education system is controlled by patriarchy...” I would add cities to the list.
The statement was striking not simply because Rahul Gandhi resoundingly acknowledged patriarchy as a political problem for Indian women but also because he connected deeply intertwined problems that otherwise appear separate and unrelated. A man harassing a girl on her way to school; the constant and exhausting male gaze; a woman being touched inappropriately in a crowded bus, even the overcrowded bus; the lack of affordable, safe, and accessible transit options; expensive car-centric infrastructure projects; poor last-mile connectivity; poor street lighting; the lack of resting spaces and childcare facilities; the absence of public toilets and the shortage of amenities, especially for women workers, street vendors, and the urban poor; moral policing; the felling of trees; cruelty toward animals; and the deepening climate crisis. All these may seem like disconnected, simultaneous crises of urban life, but they have their roots, in differing degrees, in a common and structural problem: a patriarchal spatial order, deeply mediated by caste, class, and religion, among other social factors.
In the context of cities, this order operates first at the epistemic level, in the very assumptions from which plans are drawn. Secondly at the level of representation: who is making these plans and taking these decisions. Traditional urban planning models take the default user to be male, human, able-bodied, often young, mobile, and engaged in paid, productive work. These latent assumptions nonetheless neglect many urban groups: women and children, particularly girls, the urban poor, the working class, persons with disabilities, religious and gender minorities, and other marginalised segments in the city. Cities are also often seen as exclusively human settlements, to the exclusion of every other being, whether animals, plants, or others that share the urban space.
