New Practice contributed to an article in Architects’ Journal examining newly emerging - and specific - guidance on gender-sensitive design; highlighting our experience from practice and lessons learned. Thank you to Anna Highfield for the invitation to contribute to this important discussion.
“Terms such as ‘gender mainstreaming’, ‘gender-sensitive design’ and ‘feminist urbanism’ are creeping into use in architectural dialogue. But, jargon aside, how is policy actually starting to shift? And what does it mean for architects?
In July, the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) became the first local authority in the country to introduce specific guidance on gender-sensitive design in an online handbook, Creating Places That Work For Women and Girls.
The handbook spells out the problem unequivocally: ‘The intersectional needs of women and girls have not been explicitly considered in the design of our cities.’
‘In short, women and girls shrink their lives to navigate safely,’ continues the guidance. It describes the ‘immeasurable’ impact on women of our ‘male-dominated environment’, created and perpetuated through mechanisms from planning policy to transport networks.”
““Our position at New Practice has always been that involving people in decision making will make for better places. This is most powerful when places are made through genuine connections and active listening as part of participatory approaches which centre “unusual suspects”, those communities that are labelled hard-to-reach when we might understand them instead to be hard-to-listen-to.
For us the conversation around gender in the built environment is part of a wider conversation on who makes our spaces and a drive to make inclusive spaces.
We remain broadly in favour of any guidance which supports clients and communities to expect more from design teams.Gender-informed design and inclusive spaces are a goal that we all should be working towards, we have yet to see if the current government will meet its manifesto goals for wider inclusivity around gender, but we remain hopeful that there are strong voices working to make that happen. In particular, and as a women and LGBTQIA+ led team, we are concerned that making “women and girl’s (only) spaces” has the potential to be trans-exclusionary and be appropriated within the current culture war on trans rights.
Making spaces that work for women and girls should be about making spaces that work for everyone in our communities””