Feminist city planning is the strategy of reconsidering city infrastructures with ladies’s security and mobility on the coronary heart of plans.
Taking such an strategy can imply widening footpaths for these with prams or wheelchairs, rising lighting in parks at evening or guaranteeing constructed infrastructures are as a lot a welcoming place for a girl as they’re for a person. As Leslie Kern argues in her novel, Feminist Metropolis, such an strategy “should look to the inventive instruments that ladies have all the time used to assist each other and discover methods to construct that assist into the very material of the city world.”
Submitted to Glasgow Metropolis Council by Inexperienced councillor Holly Bruce, the Feminist Metropolis Movement states it’s “basic that ladies are central to all points of planning, public realm design, coverage growth and budgets” to make sure public areas are protected and inclusive for girls.
Cllr Bruce’s movement, which shall be mentioned at Glasgow Metropolis Chambers subsequent week, proposes to embed feminist city planning into the 2017 Metropolis Improvement Plan, the primary coverage doc for the planning committee when new developments are proposed.
Chatting with The Scotsman, Ms Bruce mentioned: “I’m actually excited that we will now see geography and concrete planning via a gendered lens and I’m very eager to pursue this work via the council.
“Security is likely one of the points of feminist city planning however it’s additionally about accessibility to public areas and public providers and affordability.
“Strolling from A to B is usually a little bit of a nightmare for lots of girls, for instance, disabled ladies, those that have youngsters.”
The movement states ladies and other people of marginalised genders have numerous wants that aren’t presently mirrored on the town planning.
Below the movement, feminist city planning hopes to be thought of in new tasks such because the habitable neighbourhoods scheme which explores the idea of a 20- minute neighbourhood, permitting folks to fulfill most of their each day wants inside a 20-minute return stroll from residence.
It additionally contains actions on gender budgeting, following go well with with Edinburgh Metropolis Council and North Lanarkshire, to make sure that gender views are built-in into all phases of the funds course of.
Feminist planning approaches in locations equivalent to Vienna and Barcelona will be discovered from, based on the movement, to design areas and providers round ladies’s wants.
An intersectional feminist strategy to city planning was targeted on by the Younger Ladies’s Motion (YWCA Scotland) in a undertaking primarily based in Glasgow across the time of Sarah Everard’s homicide.
Cllr Bruce was a part of the cohort concerned on this analysis, making suggestions to Glasgow Metropolis Council on bettering public areas and providers for girls.
Jenni Snell, CEO of YWCA Scotland, mentioned: “The Younger Ladies’s Motion totally helps Cllr Holly Bruce in bringing this feminist city planning movement to GCC, and we hope that Glasgow will now prepared the ground for different native authorities in making Scotland a safer place for girls and non-binary folks.”
