Disrupting the gendered order
How to advance beyond Vienna’s strategic approach to gender mainstreaming in urban planning
O.B. Jackowska (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
C.E.L. Newton – Mentor (TU Delft - Spatial Planning and Strategy)
L.M. Calabrese – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Urban Design)
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Abstract
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 integrate their perspectives in the city's development. This research, however, reveals that the dialogue frequently remains trapped under the restricted label of 'feminist' or 'gender-sensitive', while it deserves a deeper, more nuanced discussion. Vienna’s top-down planning leaves little space for informal strategies and hence, abandons the voices of under-represented people, particularly within immigrant communities of Vienna’s outer districts. Therefore, this research dissects the city’s gender sensitivity using a set of conflicts revealing the dissonance between the social realities of vulnerable migrant women in one of the city’s fringe districts, Favoriten, and the efforts of female activists and the city administration. The data collected during extensive field interviews is documented through drawing as a method to showcase that women are less likely to simply ‘be’ in public space. These findings lead to proposal of a discussion-starter role-playing game, which places migrant women as central figures of planning processes. Disrupting the gendered order is a critical examination of how Vienna, the humanist city with a feminist attitude, can transcend beyond its rigid definition of formal urban planning and aim for multi-perspective emancipation, subsequently redefining gender mainstreaming worldwide.