Week 5: Gender, land use patterns and transport: redesigning space

This lecture explores the relationship between land use patterns and gendered travel patterns. It investigates the case for redesigning urban space in the context of new information communication technologies and issues of congestion and environmental sustainability.

The first reading for this week records the experiment to develop a car free neighbourhood development project in Bremen in Germany:

http://www.eaue.de/winuwd/56.htm

This project report does not explicitly discuss gender but discusses the reorganisation of household activities around the concept of car free cities. Household re-organisation around car free cities is, however, likely to have gender implications. Concerns about environmental sustainability are likely to have their impact in future and further considerations of car free cities, similar to the design developed in Bremen (although this failed to materialise in any substantial manner due to various financial constraints at the time of its development), in any future consideration of the development of car free cities and neighbourhoods an explicit investigation of gender effects and implications is appropriate.

The second reading is provided to demonstrate that issues of redesigning gender, housing and family life are already visible on planning agendas elsewhere:

Dolores Hayden's idea of an architectural paradise is Tynggarden near Copenhagen, Denmark, a cohousing project that balances privacy and community by dedicating a portion of the private space to communal uses. Cafe and sports facilities, solar-energy-operated centers for laundry, child care, and political meetings, and grass courtyards and playgrounds nicely complement private housing to make up a friendly, spacious, village-like whole of largely wooden buildings, "carrying a complex social program and cultural agenda into a stylistic expression" (p. 181).@ http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/technology_and_culture/v044/44.4bijsterveld.html Review of: Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing, and Family Life. By Dolores Hayden. Revised edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002. Pp. 286. $15.95.

This Danish project clearly attends to issues of accessibility and gender and we can reflect upon what the consequences of such high levels of accessibility of services and social and political functions are for women of child bearing and child rearing years.

For a virtual walk around this project click here

The third reading is a review article of the literature on telecommuting and the implications of telecommuting for urban design and the use of urban space. Whereas the early literature had predicted that telecommuting would be associated with a significant change in gender roles, household organisation and the use of space, this review article finds that the evidence for such changes is limited:

The experiences of telecommuters -- or more broadly, home-based workers -- are documented by several empirical studies. This research finds gender to be important in differentiating the motivations, experiences, and satisfactions of telecommuters. Men, unlike women, rarely choose telecommuting as a way to perform childcare responsibilities, but do so in order to increase productivity and escape the environment of the corporate workplace. Men see telecommuting as an opportunity to balance leisure with work, not childcare with work (Wajcman and Probert 1988, Lozano 1989, Olson 1989, Gurstein 1991, Holcomb 1991). Gurstein (1991) finds that these priorities are apparent in the resulting time/space patterns of women and men. Men spend more time than women on recreation, sleep, and work and less time on housework and childcare. The lack of temporal and spatial boundaries between home and work means that telecommuting often entails working long hours (Lozano 1989, Gurstein 1991). This is especially so for men, who are more likely to work in professions prone to "workaholism" (Wajcman and Probert 1988, Massey 1995). One of Penny Gurstein's respondents, concerned for his family, notes that his "goal is to cut back to six days a week" (1991, p. 173). @ http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/conf/BALTIMORE/authors/aitken/paper.html

The fourth reading is a gender checklist on protocols and processes to be observed in construction projects supported by the Asian Development Bank. The excerpt from this checklist given below provides an indication of the increasing awareness and importance of gender in urban redesign projects:

Project design
Specific components
Design of infrastructure (e.g., water supply, waste management, hygiene, transport, and electricity facilities and housing/shelters)

Actively involve beneficiary women and men in determining the number, location, and types of urban facilities and services, and incorporate their various preferences. For example, where rel-evant:

Consider a cost-effective public lighting system to make paths and streets safer for girls and women at night.

Consider a community space that is freely accessible to both women and men.

Where public transport is part of urban development, consider access points and schedules friendly to women. Where segregation is the norm, consider a women-only means of transport.

Where separation is the norm, consider creating separate spaces for men and women (e.g., women's cars in trains, women-only buses, women's toilet spaces at bus terminals or train stations) (see box 1).

Where there is a need for them, consider building shelters for battered women and children (e.g., transit homes for trafficked girls, creches for street children), or working women's hostels. Such facilities could be operated by private entities or by NGOs.

Consider locating urban facilities (e.g., water taps, latrines) where they are easily accessible to women.

Actively involve beneficiary women and men in determining housing designs and locations and incorporate their various preferences. For example:
Avoid a housing design that would unnecessarily add to women's domestic work (e.g., earth floors, overcrowding of different functions).

Consider a housing design that will provide women with adequate space and facilities, such as workspaces, storage facilities, and lighting, for home-based income-generating activities (see box 2). Zoning requirements may need to be considered in the process.

Consider providing electrical outlets in cooking areas in low-cost housing to allow for the possible use of electrical appliances later on (this may encourage families to save money for the purchase of labor-saving devices).

Design simple house plans that could easily be expanded as household incomes grow.

Consider housing locations where women have better access to water and hygiene facilities, transport, and security.

@ http://www.adb.org/Documents/Manuals/Gender_Checklists/Urban/urban500.asp?p=gencheck

Reviewing this checklist, the relationship between the design of residential spaces and transport requirements and issues relevant to gender. Land use patterns have clear transport implications and within these interactions gender has often been a concealed dimension as a consequence of the planning perspectives and evaluation methodologies which have been adopted. The Asian Development Bank checklist provides an insight into planning processes and techniques which can reveal and address gender issues which have previously been concealed.

Exploring annotated bibliographies on transportation and urban design, the materials on gendered patterns are very thin on the ground. One or two "gender" items may be located but these few items indicate the case for building a more systematic set of resources around gender, transport, land use patterns and urban design. One such item in one such annotated bibliography showcases the work of Marcus Wigan:

Wigan, M. Treatment of walking as a mode of transportation. Transportation Research Record 1487: 7-13.

1. This study was completed due to the lack of attention that walking as a form of travel has received in relation to other modes of transportation. The current concerns of governments and other agencies focus mainly on reducing the number of pedestrian injuries and deaths reported rather than working on ways to integrate walking into the treatment of mobility. This study breaks down walking and bicycling characteristics by age and gender while looking at statistics such as mean travel speeds, participation rates, and number of trips per day. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 18

2. The data used for Wigan's analysis was derived from Australian travel surveys from 1986 which covered travel data from 18,000 people over 8 years old sampled from across Australia.

3. The analysis provided by Wigan show that the current integration of pedestrian behavior, demand, and policy is deficient. Wigan claims that there is no clear organization or agency that is responsible for pedestrian planning and by default it is taken on inadequately by groups interested in road safety.

4. Wigan stresses in his analysis that the contribution of non-motorized travel to fitness and the maintenance of mobility for the elderly should be taken into consideration when building communities. The author adds that we need to have a clear and more accurate assessment of non-motorized travel and that this will allow a more balanced allocation of resources and improvements to access and mobility. @ http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/pdf/aces-workingpaper2.pdf

To conclude, the literature on gender, transport, land use patterns and urban design is limited but the literature which exists indicates there are good reasons for explicitly including gender in urban redesign and transport system redesign processes.

Further reading:

For a Swedish perspective:

http://www.sida.se/content/1/c6/03/06/82/UrbanTransp.pdf

For an American perspective:

http://www.eslarp.uiuc.edu/la/LA338-S01/groups/f/Summaries.html

For a German literature on gender and space see:

http://www.staff.uni-marburg.de/~sturm/Lehre/Lit-Geschlecht-Raum.html

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