Your City Has a Gender and It’s Male

Fouad Khan in Nautilus:

"I have a secret to tell you about my city,” she says. “It has to do with what Eve Ensler calls the feminine cell.” It was the autumn of 2016. I’d met her in Quito, Ecuador, at the United Nations’ Habitat III, the biggest global urban development conference in two decades. After a week spent pondering cities, we found ourselves talking to each other like strangers often do in the tired, busy evenings that follow a day’s hustle. “What’s the feminine cell?” I ask. “It’s empathy. It’s respect for the human experience. It’s being aware of the space you take up in the world and how that relates to the commons.” Outside the colors of Quito were drenched in rain as the bars filled with eager conference attendees and locals alike. In the second year of a post-doc studying energy footprint reduction in cities, I was just about beginning to see the connections between social justice, the urban experience, and what makes a city “tick.” “My city is always looking for solutions,” she continued. “There is no ‘place’ in my city. There are only points and routes that connect those points.”

America is having a bit of a moment right now. Powerful men long considered beyond retribution are being called out for their transgressions. Behavior long tolerated in a culture where female objectification is in the very air we breathe is being re-examined. It reminds me of the conversation I had in Quito two years ago.

As we look again at our culture, why stop with behavior? It is also time to re-examine the hardware of our societies. The very infrastructure that we have built—roads, buildings, public spaces, steel, dirt, and concrete—encodes a set of values too. Are these the values we aspire to as a society and civilization? The cities we’ve built don’t provide perfectly equal access to everyone. An obvious case in point: wheelchair ramps, or lack thereof. But even healthy, active residents of all genders may not consider all of a city accessible to them. Men, for instance, typically don’t consider a dimly lit street lined by bars or clubs an unsafe or inaccessible part of town. For women, braving the same street past midnight has completely different connotations. Like video game players who have been leveled up, men can simply access a much larger part of a city or town at a wider variety of times. One Europe-wide survey found that 30 percent of all physical violence and 16 percent of sexual violence against women happens in bars, clubs, discos and other public places²—something that women are very much aware of and which influences how they move around a city.

More here.