Rethinking Urban Spaces through Gender Mainstreaming

The city of the future will be more sustainable, leveraging technology and nature, but it must also be more inclusive, which entails conducting efforts to engage in reflexivity regarding the making of the city. For feminist geographer Leslie Kern, the urban environment is not neutral. It was set up to support standards and power relations and was long operated by white men from the upper classes. She invites us to examine a broader spectrum of needs of city dwellers and to reintroduce embodied reality into urban design. This results in tangible spatial interventions, for instance, on lighting and walkways, but also on social issues, around mixed use and taking into account marginalized voices in the decision-making processes.