Introduction Celebrating 8th March: Women and the City, Actors, Citizens and Policy-Makers Inés Sánchez de Madariaga Inés Novella Abril

Inés Sánchez De Madariaga^1*Inés Novella Abril^1,2*

• ¹Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
• ²Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain

Celebrating 8 th March: Women and the City, Actors, Citizens and Policy-Makers Inés Sánchez de Madariaga Inés Novella AbrilThe International Women's Day takes place on 8 th March, celebrating the achievements of women throughout history. Equally as important, this is a date to raise awareness for the inequalities that women across the globe still face daily. Every year 8 th March represents an opportunity to acknowledge that historically cities have not been designed with women in mind, creating not only unsafe areas, but also making it harder for women to physically move and live in cities that were mostly built for able bodied, adult men. This opens up the floor to discuss and consider the importance of using women's perspectives and experiences to build smarter, resilient cities of the future.By 2050 it is estimated that 7 in 10 people will live in a city, but currently ''the price women pay for living in cities includes unequal opportunities, unpaid labour, violence, poverty, unequal amounts of unpaid care work, limited job opportunities, and lack of power in both public and private decision making'' (UNDP, 2022). Gender intersects with race, class, and ethnicity to further exacerbate these issues, impacting upon women's rights as well as creating multiple forms of oppression and exclusion for women. This book compiles the articles included in the special issue of the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Cities celebrating International Women's Day, under the topic Building Equity through smarter, more resilient cities of the future. It aims to address the social inclusionspecific dimensions of city building, highlighting the importance of specific infrastructure development that addresses care tasks, and considering how to build resilient future cities that serve everyone, irrelevant of gender, age, disabilities, or ethnicity, providing equitable urban living conditions.The book is divided into three sections. The first section contains three articles that look at various dimensions of the role of women as architects. The second section looks at women's realities, needs, and aspirations regarding cities and territories, with a focus on mobility, transportation, and climate change, with papers looking at experiences in the USA, Scandinavia, and several countries in the developing world. The third section contains two articles that address how planning and public policy can become more responsive to women's needs, focusing into the specific areas of housing and care facilities, sometimes referred to as care infrastructure, in Latin America and Spain.In their paper entitled I am an architect, Gender and Professional Identity in Architecture, MacMagnus and O'Donnell provide ample empirical evidence from Ireland demonstrating the multifaceted, contradictory, and sometimes paradoxical experience women face as architects. The authors contend that the confluence of gender and professional identity continues to be unresolved for women architects. This is so even after over a century of their admittance into architectural education, their increasing participation in the profession, and the relevance of current debates on related issues such as those regarding feminist, gender, or women specific forms of architectural practices and identities.The authors arrive at this result after analyzing the Irish Architecture Career Tracker Survey of 2023, which received over 680 completed online questionnaires from respondents ranging in age from 20 to 72, with a follow up of 23 semi-structured interviews. Their research examines the interplay between gender and professional identity of those working within, and outside of, architectural professional practice in Ireland. The analysis of this rich empirical material shows how "women architects have to negotiate a paradoxical project: they are relatively recent entrants into a male-dominated profession which in common with many professions has defined excellence in masculinist terms, and they must resist those discourses while articulating a vision that both values their gendered lives, yet can fit in with the profession which routinely designs for general publics". Within a similar line of inquiry, the next paper by Navarro Astor y Rodríguez-Leudo takes a closer look at women's lives as architects by considering the functioning of architectural offices, and more specifically at gender differences in the perception and levels of workplace happiness. This paper relies on qualitative and quantitative data and a sample of 200 workers from 60 architectural practices in Valencia, Spain. Within an overall positive perception of happiness in the workplace, significant gender differences were found.While recognition, appreciation, feeling valued, and achievement, all factors pointing to career development, are the main drivers of men's workplace happiness, for women the source of happiness comes mostly from the work environment, their colleagues, and their team. In addition, women experience negative emotions such as anxiety, anger, or sadness more frequently than men. These results point to persistent gender differences between women and men. How to make work life increasingly meaningful and ensuring that business actions aim at improving quality of life and human development for all is still a challenge for architectural firms that require close attention to gender considerations.The last paper of this section looks at women in architecture from a biographical standpoint with an article on the early work of architect, musician, activist, educator and researcher Anna Bofill during the period 1977-1996. María E. Gutiérrez-Mozo and her coauthors present Bofill's early contributions to feminist thinking in architecture, within the context of the vast and plural production, of a singular, cosmopolitan and politically engaged personality. Bofill has achieved most public recognition as a composer, the field in which she has been most productive over time, while her work as an architect did not receive recognition until recently, exemplifying the barriers and discrimination faced by pioneering women in architecture.Bofill joined the Taller de Arquitectura in 1964, while still a student at the School of Architecture in Barcelona, from which she graduated in 1972. In 1981 she started an independent career, heading her own office for two decades, during a period in which solo practice was practically inexistent for Spanish women architects, although her first solo works date from 1977. Her work at the head of her office shows rather uncommon traits, much against the spirit of the time: a fundamental commitment to people's welfare; a focus on the spatial implications of women's lives in cities and towns, and hence on how urban planning and design can provide housing, transportation, public space, facilities, and employment spaces that are better suited to their specific needs and desires; a significant body of written work, extending over a number of fields, including most notably her reflections on gender issues in urban planning; and the implementation of participatory processes in her project designs.The second section of the book looks at women's lives in the city, and how planning should take their differential needs and preferences into consideration. The first paper of this section examines the mobility of care in Washington DC. Dina Passman and her coauthors look critically at how infrastructure regularly supports male pursuits more than women's, focusing on gender inequity by quantifying daily trips for everyday care provision, often termed mobility of care. They analyze gendered travel behavior in the National Capital Region of the United States, including Washington DC, using data from the 2017/2018 Regional Travel Survey conducted by the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board. This survey included records from approximately 16,000 households and 19,274 unique people who made 49,215 trips, most of them using the local bus and subway systems. Researchers recoded trip purpose data into five broad categories (care, work, shopping, leisure, school, and all other purposes) with the following results: trips for work represent the majority of trips (34.7%), by shopping (28.2%), care (22.3%), leisure (8.5%), other (4.1%), and school trips (2.3%). Women make more care-related trips than men (25.1% vs. 18.8%). They also make fewer work-related trips than men (30.3% vs. 40.2%).Regression analyses revealed correlations between care-related travel by all modes and public transportation by age, race, location of residence, and income. The mobility of care is one of the primary reasons people travel in and around the Washington DC region. However, the bus and subway systems are primarily designed to support the mobility of work mostly done by men. This study demonstrates the need for improvements in genderresponsive infrastructure, including public transportation policies and programs that explicitly address the mobility of care.Christina Lindkvist takes a complementary viewpoint on gender and transportation by looking at women's lived experiences of using public transport for everyday mobility, in her paper entitled Gendered mobility strategies and challenges to sustainable travelpatriarchal norms controlling women's everyday transportation. Using a feminist perspective based on gender system theory, in combination with time-geography and mobility strategies, she analyzes qualitative data from two national surveys, the Travel Survey and the Time Use Survey, which provide data on women living in peripheral urban neighborhoods in the three metropolitan regions of Sweden.The interviews explored mobility practices and strategies, experiences with different modes of transport, reliability, affordability, and comfort of the mobility options available. The analysis shows that travel choice is affected by women's concerns about safety and by the related adaptation to situations identified as threatening, that women are the main carers, and that they take most escorting trips of family members who cannot move autonomously in the city.This study demonstrates persistent gender differences in transportation, with women's movement still limited by patriarchal socio-cultural structures, even in Sweden, a country recognized for being a forerunner when it comes to gender equality. Despite policies addressing discrimination, Swedish women still fear travelling by public transport and to go out at night, pointing to persistent gender social norms.In her paper Listen, Talk, Repeat: Women's Journey Through Architecture and Environmental Consciousness, Anna Papadopoulou further explores how women's connection to everyday life and domesticity has the capacity to inform the design of built spaces in ways that are socially inclusive, while mitigating the degradation of the built environment. Acknowledging that the design of form and space is founded on uneven relationships of power, this paper aims at elucidating how harnessing these power differences can help deliver a more sustainable built environment. Drawing on feminist methodologies based on a degree of subjectivity, that derive from the social constructs of everyday life and domesticity, it uses a practical approach embodied in the three-step process of "listen, talk, repeat" to frame a discourse on gender differences in the built space, societal systems, and communities, and their members.Papadopoulou illustrates with examples how these three steps have been evoked by women of diverse backgrounds to navigate and thrive in their everyday life, and concludes that "deployment of this three-step mindset enables designers of all gender identities to mediate between theoretical space and practical applications, and to reposition socioecological sustainability as a fundamental aspect in salvaging a planet ravaged by extractivism and human ambition". Understanding how women have identified with this operational perspective reveals a rich tapestry of ideas, organized by collective movements such as ecofeminism and the drive for resilience and sustainability.The following paper further addresses ecological issues and provides a bridge with the next section by advancing policy recommendations, by looking at the impacts of the climate crisis on gender inequality. This paper by Sofia Castelo and her co-authors looks to identify priorities for gender responsive climate policy based on the recognition that the climate crisis disproportionately impacts women and girls all over the world. Geographically it looks at South Asia focusing on Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, a region highly vulnerable to climate change that is characterized by having strong patriarchal values. Gender norms in the region heighten women and girls' vulnerability to climate impacts, both in general and in situations of crisis resulting from extreme weather events.This paper provides a review of an extensive body of literature, both specialty books and scientific articles, recent institutional reports, news or journalistic reports from reliable international press, which provide scientific data to support the integration of a gender perspective in urban adaptation standard practices and priorities in terms of policy to safeguard women and girls are identified accordingly. It argues that deepening the understanding of the climate crisis' impact on gender in South Asia, a region at the frontline of these effects, can assist in reaching a baseline understanding of the challenge from a global perspective. It further argues that climate action and urban development cannot be considered separately from women's rights. Among the suggested policy strategies, the article proposes the allocation of half of climate funds, including those of loss and damage, directly to women or women-led organizations.The last section of the book contains two articles addressing policy making. The first one by Inés Novella Abril one looks at gender mainstreaming in the housing sector using as a case study the experience of the Region of Valencia in Spain. As a relatively advanced case of gender mainstreaming, the experience of Valencia illustrates the complexity of the processes, some possible stages to take into account, and the diversity of initiatives and actions that can be implemented. The Valencian case is of particular interest because it exemplifies a comprehensive approach to gender mainstreaming in housing policies, which facilitated the development of initiatives aimed at addressing both socioeconomic and spatial gender-based inequalities.Novella Abril demonstrates the importance of political support, favorable regulatory frameworks, and the contribution of expert knowledge, as evidenced by the experience of collaborations between the Generalitat Valenciana and the UNESCO Chair on Gender of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Important elements of gender mainstreaming were the development of various regulations, including mandatory technical standards on residential building design, and pilot demonstrative projects that illustrate how gender design criteria can be put into actual practice. The Valencia case also illuminates the difficulties inherent in gender mainstreaming efforts within any field of public policy, emphasizing the necessity of meticulous progression toward the realization of gender equality.Finally, the last paper of the book provides an overview of the state of the art in gender mainstreaming in city planning by analyzing recent policy efforts in Latin America that aim at rethinking, prioritizing and supporting the way care tasks can be performed in urban and rural environments, in order to contribute to reducing inequality in cities and territories, being Latin America the most unequal region in the world. Authors Inés Sánchez de Madariaga and Carina Arvizu Machado argue that in order to achieve this, gender mainstreaming must come to the forefront in urban policies, at all scales and phases of the policy cycle: from planning, regulation, and legislation, to design, construction and management of cities and the services they provide.The normative idea of a "city of care" overcomes traditional visions of urban realities based on the dichotomy between the productive and reproductive spheres, by appropriately supporting care work, which is essential for the reproduction of society and for sustaining life and the economy. Gender mainstreaming in urban policies aims at shaping cities in ways that their physical, social, economic, cultural, and power dimensions contribute to facilitating the realization of care work.Analyzing how recent efforts are being made to frame care as a right and emphasizing the importance of gender mainstreaming in urban planning to achieve urban transformations that support care work, this last paper identifies the numerous policy and legal instruments developed mostly since the pandemic throughout the continent that aim at creating the conditions to building "care systems". It showcases three cases from Latin America, two from Mexico City (UTOPÍAS and PILARES) and one in Bogotá (Manzanas del Cuidado), which have set out to advance access to rights in Latin America, including the right to care. This book is part of and builds on a broader intellectual project by the editors that has already materialized on several edited collections addressing gender and planning. The book Fair Shared Cities. The Impact of Gender Planning in Europe, co-edited by Sánchez de Madariaga and Roberts in 2013, provided a first panoramic analysis of the state of the art of both research and practice on gender in planning in the European continent, putting together for the first time key experiences and contributions around the continent, spanning over a period of some 30 years. This book was nicely complemented by a second collection co-edited by Zibell, Damyanovic and Sturm entitled Gendered Approaches to Spatial Development in Europe -Perspectives, Similarities and Differences.A third collection Engendering Cities: Designing Sustainable Urban Spaces for All, co-edited by Sánchez de Madariaga and Neuman in 2020, widened the focus to show a snapshot of practice and research around the world, while a special issue of the Spanish journal Ciudad y Territorio, also of 2020, narrowed the focus to look at the emerging Spanish experience, which is today leading the way on innovation on gender mainstreaming in the planning field.The present book contributes to these efforts by putting together a selection of contributions from around the world, combining original research with the analysis of policy and practice. The combined array of topics and methodologies are representative of the richness, depth, and width of the conceptual approaches and viewpoints that today inform this new academic research area, demonstrating that gender and planning is becoming a ripe area of research and practice around the world. The contributions in this book also demonstrate the persistence of gender inequalities in cities around the world that continue to demand the consolidation and expansion of a gendered outlook on city building. This collection shows the sophistication of current scholarship on gender in the city, showing paths for future advances in both research and practice.