Seminar Series1: Gender, transport and information communication in the developed world.

Week 4: Redesigning the relationship between gender, transport and information communication technology: identifying the importance of gender representation in planning

This seminar draws attention to the role information communication technologies can play in better integrating women into the planning process and transport and planning professions

The key reading for this seminar is:

http://www.iom.int/en/who/main_policies_gender.shtml

The new information communication technologies greatly assist in the ready organisation and archiving of information on the relationship between gender and transport. They also greatly assist in the relay and dissemination of this information. Furthermore, the new information communication technologies provide for ready interaction with information data bases and archives: the technologies can be used to create feed back loops which provide for the correcting and fine tuning of data.

New information communication technologies have the potential to enable women to better participate in urban planning and decision making even on highly restricted time budgets. Urban planning materials can be placed on readily accessible electronic sites and indeed within the USA such practices can already be observed.

E-technologies enable patterns of links to be made between adjacent planning areas and have the potential to assist in the development of social movements around transport and transport planning. New of successful projects is easily broadcast, information on failures or restricted successes can likewise be transmitted at very low costs. The potential to build a global quality gender and transport planning archive is already present - to date, however, neither governance institutions nor gender social movements have done so.

Our reading today shows that at the organisational level, many organisations are beginning to integrate gender considerations into their operations and analysis and that these processes of integration are displayed through new information communication technologies - this has not yet resulted in the full integration of equitable gender representation in societal planning or design culture processes. Inequities in transport design culture and transport planning remain but their visibility is increased by information communication technology.

Click here to return to seminar course outline.

Margaret Grieco, D.Phil.(Oxon.)
Professor of Transport and Society
Napier University
Edinburgh
and
Maria Goeppert Mayer Visiting Professor
Department of Mechanical Engineering under the auspices of the Centre for Gender Studies
Technical University of Braunschweig
Germany

e-mail at [email protected]