Sustainable Urban Planning: A Gender Perspective

Dear Colleagues,

This special issue will address gender mainstreaming in urban and regional planning, as a key element of sustainability, by focusing on how to advance actual implementation. It seeks to expand research on actual policies, programs, plans, initiatives, and projects, implemented around the world, in ways that can point to innovative directions for future advances and greater transformative capacity towards more gender equal cities and human settlements. The principle of gender mainstreaming, introduced as an approach to equality policies at the Beijing Conference of 1995, when applied to the field of urban planning and mobility, addresses the spatial implications of care, daily life, safety, intersectionality, access to employment, and women’s representation, as key elements in building more egalitarian cities and transport systems.

Marion Roberts (2019) has argued how key gender issues in planning, including the agendas on care and women’s representation, among others, have been coopted by neoliberalism and largely voided of their transformative capacity. According to Roberts, this process was reinforced by the negative, if unintended, consequences of the recent preeminence of recognition versus redistribution as the core principle underlying feminist agendas.  

This special issue seeks to explore ways to buttress the transformative potential of gender perspectives in urban planning, by bringing redistribution back as a core principle of gender equality agendas in urban planning.  

In order to equally address both issues of redistribution and of recognition, gender planning, or feminist planning, needs to make ample use of the full range of planning powers governments have at their disposal, at all scales, and beyond the soft powers that are today mostly being used in the many cities and countries around the world that have been addressing gender issues in urban matters in the past few years.  

Some avenues for increasing the principle of redistribution involve integrating gender perspectives at the regional scale, in municipal level plans, and in public policies involving greater public roles in land and real estate markets.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:  

Research on gender perspectives that address land-use legislation and regulation, zoning ordinances, regional planning, municipal level planning, transportation planning, facility planning, infrastructure planning, housing policies, regeneration and redevelopment projects, and direct public interventions in land and real estate markets, to create gender responsive infrastructure, transportation, facilities, employment spaces, and housing.

Secondarily, and only when they have significant demonstrated impact, research on soft planning measures, including awareness-raising, social media campaigns, participatory workshops, participatory action research, pilot programs, etc.  

I look forward to receiving your contributions. 

Prof. Dr. Inés Sánchez de Madariaga
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• gender mainstreaming
• care infrastructure
• gender equality
• redistribution
• recognition
• urban planning
• transportation
• housing
• implementation
• public space
• feminist planning