We, all feminist architects and researchers - Amelia Vilaplana, the architectural studio Equal Saree, María Novas and Serafina Amoroso - met during the seminars held in Lisbon in 2015 on the theme Matrices, organized by Patricia Santos Pedrosa. This congress aimed to continue the symposium ArquitectAs. Redefining the Profession, which took place in Seville in 2014 and was organized by Nuria Álvarez Lombardero. Based on what we learned from these two events, it seemed important to us to continue the congress in order to both reinforce the work developed in previous editions and attempt to open the debate in a transdisciplinary manner, inviting contributions that could enrich the discussion from fields outside academia. This also included highlighting participatory practices and urban experiences carried out by or in collaboration with public administrations, among others. ... Read more

The Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, the Dutch museum for architecture, design, and digital cultures, is actively working to bring overlooked actors and forgotten stories into the discourse. The focus is on examining the role archives play in shaping urban history and challenging institutional memory and dominant historiography. Since 2020, the Collecting Otherwise project has aimed to reveal and expand understanding of the National Collection of Architecture and Urban Planning in relation to contemporary societal issues. This collaborative effort, including the Cherchez la femme! project (2021-2023), explores how these initiatives have reshaped institutional practices in archiving, collecting, and curating. By engaging with unacknowledged agents, the process has led to new heritage practices and informed collection decisions. This paper discusses the implications of these choices from various perspectives in the archival process—curator, researcher, activist, and donor. Rather than viewing heritage as a neutral legacy, the approach highlights new forms of knowledge production and transfer during and beyond the archival process, presenting new forms of collecting, producing, and transferring knowledge during, meanwhile and after the process of archival collection starts. ... Read more

In the first quarter of the 21st century, we are facing the profound impact of overexploitation of the Earth and the consolidation of a globalized capitalism with deep colonial and patriarchal roots. Two major challenges converge at this crucial point: the climate crisis and growing social inequality. In urban and territorial studies, we tend to produce city-centered analyses that ignore the ecological footprint on the spaces —and bodies— that sustain them, often referred to as emptied territories. However, in Galicia, territorial practices persist which, despite having been historically devalued, have survived to the present day. These include family farming for local consumption. The spaces of Galician family farming allow us to imagine alternative ways of inhabiting the territory that go beyond the rural-urban dichotomy. Many older Galician women continue to support this system of production and reproduction of the land, creating essential networks of cooperation and interdependence. This research article documents the workspaces of some of these agroecological producers of farming descent who have played, and continue to play, a decisive role in the food sovereignty of numerous Galician families, respecting the environment, and caring for biodiversity. ... Read more

In the 1950s, married women in the Netherlands were assimilated into the fixed ideal of heteronormative family and traditional family housing standards which were the norm; single women were not. Single women represented not only a separate category in post-Second World War society but also a stigmatised one. What was a woman without a man? Women were simply not expected to live alone. In the mid-twentieth century, however, high-rise residential projects were designed to enable women to live independently. Over a period of more than thirty years, Dutch women’s organisations and pioneering women architects made a key contribution to collaboratively develop emancipatory and innovative residential projects in the country’s biggest cities. In 1948, the Elisabeth Brugsma Foundation commissioned the architectural office Pot & Pot-Keegstra to build the Elisabeth Brugsmaflat in The Hague. The process was difficult, and took a long time, before the Elisabeth Brugsmaflat finally opened its doors in 1958. It was an important step to the progressive normalisation of women living independently, and also contributed to the improvement of housing standards for all. ... Read more

A proposta tem como objetivo apresentar trabalhos no contexto de pandemia, com intuito de debater perspectivas de investigação feminista e de vivências distintas das mulheres em seus territórios urbanos. Busca-se evidenciar como no contexto da pandemia tem sido fundamental dar luz à vida cotidiana das mulheres para evidenciar experiências e compreensões das resistências e acomodações. Um caminho construído que tem produzido visões insurgentes sobre os territórios a partir da interseccionalidade como instrumento epistemológico e de aliança/luta diante das instabilidades territoriais produtoras de precariedade urbana e experiências de segregação profundamente paradoxais. Os trabalhos a serem apresentados são: "Gestão Feminista do Habitat: reflexões a partir da pele doméstica", “O território feminista da cidade patriarcal”, “Mulheres e subúrbios carioca”, “Estádios, cidades, demarcações e disputas: uma análise espacial pelo olhar das mulheres”. ... Read more

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 event exceeded their prospects in an unanticipated way. Since 1991, the City of Vienna led the way to the conceptualization of gender mainstreaming that was happening at the European level – and that did not take place until 1997, when the Amsterdam Treaty came into effect. In 1992, the City of Vienna established the Women’s Office, with authority in urban affairs. Paradoxically, the success of the exhibition did not allow the organizers to properly document and preserve it, nor was it conserved in the City’s Archive. This unprecedented research relies on unreleased archival material gathered from the personal archives of the exhibition’s photographers, as well as from ad-hoc interviews with the organizers, Jutta Kleedorfer and Eva Kail. Thirty years later, the City of Vienna is known for this approach to urban planning. The exhibition ‘Who Owns Public Spaces? Women’s Everyday Life in the City’ was the turning point. ... Read more

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 the process of addressing the methodologically and epistemologically gendered blind spots that reinforce structural inequality in the academy. We reflect on our experiences developing two interlinked Architectural History courses on the MSc Architecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences between 2019 and 2021 at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). The chapter explores the challenge of introducing traditionally marginalised forms of architectural knowledge – such as ones coming from feminist theory – within an existing institutional framework, while also interrogating the essential acts of collaboration between students, researchers, and teachers that take place in the process. ... Read more

In the post-WWII period in the Netherlands, a women’s organization set the agenda for improving the quality of social housing projects. Through bureaucratic procedures, the Vrouwen Adviescommissie (VAC, Women Advisory Committee) managed to open up a path for women’s interventions at the Municipality of Rotterdam, while expanding its network to more than 285 VACs in the Netherlands from 1946 to 1994. Their expertise influenced building codes, regulations and policies in social housing and urban design. However, their early role as model home organizers remains unknown. This paper unveils the conceptual and design work of the VAC through the model homes exhibitions they produced in Rotterdam and its surroundings in the earlier 1950s — such as the one in Overschie (which attracted around 3,000 people), in Hoogvliet (around 2,700) and Schiebroek (1,500). The research reveals that, before the well-known model homes exhibited in the Netherlands by the foundation Goed Wonen (Good Dwelling) during the mid-1950s and 1960s, the VAC made pioneering efforts in strengthening the public’s relationship with social housing and interior design. They displayed traditional and modern furniture in different combinations, focusing on the needs of women performing domestic (unwaged) work. ... Read more

The process of identifying, interpreting, and implementing societal values in university education is an essential part of responsible innovation and designing for equitable, inclusive, and sustainable societies. While there is now a well-defined and growing body of research on the theory and application of designing for values (or ‘value sensitive design’), at present the pedagogical dimension remains underexplored. Teaching Design for Values: Concepts, Tools and
Practices is a resource for teachers of design-based disciplines who wish to foreground values more explicitly in their classes. With fourteen chapters written by both TU Delft educators and international contributors, the book aims to examine the concepts, methods, and experiences of teaching design for values within a variety of fields, including urbanism, engineering, architecture, artificial intelligence, and industrial design. ... Read more

This article approaches post-war housing innovation in the Netherlands from a feminist perspective, shedding light on the hitherto unkown roles played by women architects. It introduces the work of Dutch women architects, some of it acknowledged at the time of its creation, some completely unknown. First, Augustine Schreuder-Gratama, one of the first female students in Delft in the 1920s, and the Women Advisory Committee (VAC) for social housing ―specifically their role as model homes exhibitions developers in the context of housing industrialisation in the 1950s, in which other organizations have been considered pioneer. Then work of Luzia Hartsuyker-Curjel from the democratization period including the second feminist wave in the 1970s and 1980s is presented. Amongst others, she proposed a ‘non-hierarchical dwelling’ based on feminist critique of the nuclear family home. Finally, the article presents the work of Ineke Hulshof in the 1990s and early 21st century ―against a background of neo-liberalism she developed projects for affordable, sustainable housing and new architectural tools to design and co-create with residents’ groups. To conclude, this article argues that their contribution to the evolution of architecture in the Netherlands is underestimated and their role in housing innovation should be better articulated as part of the architectural records. ... Read more

Shëmti and feísmo are the two names given respectively in the Albanian and Galician languages to stigmatize this unruly built environment: It is considered a material expression of both constructed and internalized myth of being the underdeveloped peoples in the European periphery. This paper aims to explore how this stigmatization has been constructed and materialized in the built environment and the political and professional discourse. The paper presents a situational but also comparative analysis of Albanian and Galician realities, drawing similarities and different local perspectives present in academia, media, politics and architectural circles. This multi-layered and hybrid observation seeks to further explore the relational, ethnographic narratives of resistance, that subvert the myth of what is commonly understood as ugliness. Did the media or the political rhetoric of beautification had an impact over the years? Did the depreciation or demolition of heritage play a role in the production of identitarian stigmas? Are self-building practices at the root of this understanding of ugliness? We aim to see these architectural expressions differently, as playing a paradigmatic role in disrupting the hygienist industrialized models of European cities which are extensively promoted as the only way of designing the built environment. ... Read more

Non se trata dunha práctica inocente, existen maneiras de mirar. De xeito consciente e inconsciente, non vemos, senón que lemos a linguaxe das imaxes. As mesmas que dende tempos remotos coquetean na definición dos estándares do xénero e a sexualidade. ... Read more

TThe remoteness of Galicia, a cultural and linguistic bridge between Portugal and Spain, did not prevent it from playing a significant role in the history of female architects in the Iberian Peninsula. Nine Galician pioneers have carved the path since the first generation of Spanish female architects outlined the precedents during the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1939). They were also present in an initial period, even if housewifization theories were intensively fueled by the dictatorship (1939–1975); likewise during the continuity period in the transition to democracy (1975–1982), and the second wave of feminism. However, it would not be until progressive democratic institutionalization (1982–1986) that more women gained access to architectural studies in university (consolidation period); but what is the legacy of these pioneers? Are Galician female architects ‘in transition’ yet? Based on data primarily collected by research group MAGA and released publications, this piece explores how, despite their achievements, their recognition is still superficial. And even if the number of undergraduate students reached quantitative equality, female practitioners continue to leave architecture and these numbers are increasing. Towards a critical approach to inequality in the profession, this article researches the history—and stories—of Galician female architects to examine how far we are from effective equality in the Galician architectural world. ... Read more