A Women's House for Droixhe: Exploring Human-Centric Architecture as a Catalyst for Social Connection, Urban Revitalization, and Women Empowerment

This project delves into the transformative potential of human-centric architecture as a catalyst for social connection, urban revitalization, and empowerment in the neighborhood of Droixhe in Liège, Belgium. Drawing inspiration from the collective Les Amis de L'Étang, comprising 15 social organizations, the research explores the concealed...

"Oh yes! over-preparing for meetings is my jam :)": The Gendered Experiences of System Administrators

In the system and network administration domain, gender diversity remains a distant target. The experiences and perspectives of sysadmins who belong to marginalized genders (non cis-men) are not well understood beyond the fact that sysadmin work environments are generally not equitable. We address this knowledge gap in our study by focusing on...

Celebrating HERstories in architecture and planning on International Women’s Day

At the dawn of International Women’s Day, I want to highlight the importance of feminist solidarity and the need to amplify the voices of these women who have been at the forefront of local organisations and planning in their communities. Too often, these women have been overlooked in the writing of (planning and design) history. By celebrating...

Busy Body: Living and Working in Urban Renewal Neighbourhoods

Urban renewal reinforces the isolation of working-class women. This was concluded in the 1983 publication “Zoiets maak je toch niet, ik zeg altijd, dat doen mannen…”. This booklet criticizes 1980s participatory urban renewal of the Staatsliedenbuurt in Amsterdam and addresses the exclusion of women. Several inventive tools were developed in this...

More than half the picture: Challenges at the encounter of feminism and architectural history

Historically, the work of white Western male architects has dominated architectural history education. In recent decades a large body of scholarship has attempted to critically question this, highlighting and subverting mainstream disciplinary values, which are informed by gendered, racial, classist, and colonial biases. This chapter explores...

Making Access: Increasing Inclusiveness in Making

In this one-day workshop we are going to make access. We aim to counteract the phenomenon that access to making (e.g., in makerspaces, fablabs, etc.) is not equally distributed, with certain groups of people being underrepresented (e.g., women∗1). After brief introductions from participants and a set of three impulse keynotes, we will...

On Diffractions: Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration

In this collection, we examine people, places, and things as diffracted through migration. Migration is an event and a concept. Diffraction is what happens in the moment when energy meets an obstacle. The feminist histories collected here speak of that moment.