Disrupting the gendered order: How to advance beyond Vienna’s strategic approach to gender mainstreaming in urban planning

The challenges women encounter due to numerous disparities within social superstructures are finally finding their way into mainstream debates. Interestingly, Vienna is the first European city that has been incorporating the concept of gender mainstreaming into urban planning practices since the 1990s, by providing formal platforms for women to...

Who owns public spaces? The trailblazer exhibition on women’s everyday life in the City of Vienna (1991)

This article contributes to shedding light, documenting, and disseminating a pioneer event that has not been part of the recorded history of urban planning. In 1991, two feminist engineers working at the City of Vienna’s Urban Planning Office organized a ground-breaking exhibition with the aim of understanding gender bias in urban design. The...

Loiter City: Spatial Strategies to redefine a woman’s place in a public realm

Gender is a highly context-specific social construct. It explores the social relationships between men and women, a relationship in which women have been systematically subordinated (Oakley 1972). The way gender relations are defined broadly influence the conceptualisation of space and place. In a patriarchy like India, where gender inequality...