Objectives of the study
a) To understand surveillance driven infrastructure and safety of Gender Minorities by critically analyzing the metropolitan cities
b) Can gender based violence (VAW) really reduce with the introduction of feminist & intersectional urbanism?
c) To conceptualize the role of NMT (non-motorised transport) policies as sustainable mobility and a gender sensitive transport planning
d) To understand the need a feminist perspective to urban transportation planning
e) To understand gender urbanism from a lens of mobility planning and entrenched patriarchy.
f) To approach the level of solvency as to how can cities be truly welcoming?
g) Aiming to comprehend sociologist perspective on feminist urbanism
Introduction
In 2021, 428,278 of the six million crimes recorded in India involved crimes against women. Noticing an increase in gendered crimes, the Indian government sanctioned INR 2,919.55 crore (approximately USD 360 million) in 2019 under the 'Safe City Project' to deploy face recognition-enabled CCTV cameras and drones in eight cities to provide "safety to women in public places." The government started the 'Smart Cities Mission' in 100 cities in 2015, with a budget of INR 191,294 crore (about USD 25 billion) to construct smart cities with similar surveillance infrastructure aimed at the "safety and security of citizens, particularly women."
Given the literature that criticizes gendered safety measures that restrict women's movement through surveillance, the massive capital investment allocated for implementing these national projects begs the question of where investment is most needed to actualize women's public safety in urban cities. In other words, what would a feminist smart city for women and trans*-queer populations look like? How would it differ from the surveillance-driven infrastructure at the center of continuing state efforts to produce safety?
During my research for urban studies, I found few lucrative plans which facilitate gendered based town planning, one such goals for the LCAU seed grant are as follows:
(1) To gather perspectives from social workers, women's rights organizations, and gender-minoritized communities in India on which specific areas capital should be allocated to create safer public spaces for women in urban India.
(2) To use this data to create a public-facing digital visualization map and website highlighting and amplifying community voices; and
(3) To assist in organizing the participating grassroot communities to use these outputs to influence policy and integrate a more democratic process into smart city projects addressing safety and mobility.
While urban planning and design strategies frequently urge for better street lighting, mixed-use development, and more eyes on the street, there is also a need to understand how perceptions of safety are cognitively, sociologically, and geographically created.
As argued in Why Loiter: Women and Risk on Mumbai's Streets, the demand for safer public spaces for women must not be met by excluding other minority groups, whether migrants -particularly working-class women and lower castes and/or Muslim men & women in Indian cities - or by a patriarchal surveillance of women's bodies and actions.
Similarly, rather than viewing the city as a threat from which women must be protected, we must see and design public spaces in which women would like to spend time, or "loiter," or "to not have a purpose to enjoy public spaces, use public infrastructure after dark, or indulge in consensual flirtation and sexual encounters."
As a result, a project to make a city safer for women is concerned not just with physical changes, but also with the right of women to loiter without eliminating other minority identities. This necessitates additional research into what motivates women of various income levels, castes, religions, and regions to spend time in public areas, as well as what kind of eyes on the street encourage women's presence in public spaces.
Walking out of a metro station in Bengaluru & Delhi and seeing expanses of ‘smart' bikes and cycles for the ease of last and first-mile connectivity is a typical sight. However, these cycles are only accessible via a smartphone application and are not well adapted to the city's automobile-clogged major roads or the city's inadequately illuminated, poorly maintained, pothole-ridden alleys and by-lanes. This method provides access to a cycle that is currently inaccessible to large sectors of the city population, particularly girls and women from caste and class disadvantaged backgrounds.
When the presence of cycles is not accompanied by well-thought-out policies that are sensitive to gendered dimensions of bicycle use such as road safety, street harassment, and clothing worn by the majority of women, such facilities become not only ineffective for large segments of the city but also discriminatory in nature. Every aspect of city life is affected by urban mobility, including safety, access to opportunity, and independence. Unfortunately, urban and transportation planning has been mostly gender blind, with little awareness of the interrelationships between gender, socioeconomic disparities, and violence. If half of the urban population's access to the city is determined by safety, then any urban mobility policy that does not incorporate safety into its formulation would fail.
Sustainable urban mobility policies that emphasize non-motorized transportation infrastructure, such as provision for pedestrians and bicycles, and an emphasis on low-cost public transportation, notably bus transportation, must incorporate a feminist perspective. This is critical to ensuring that NMT (non-motorised transport) policies are equal, inclusive, and effectively implemented. To fulfill the goals of sustainable mobility, a gender sensitive transport planning was advised in a 2015 paper on encouraging low carbon transport. According to research, women in the city rely on walking at a higher rate than males.
Women, in addition to walking, are heavily reliant on public transportation. Even when a household's income increased, men began to use private vehicles, but women remained to use public or paratransit forms of transportation. This suggests that women are already the dominant consumers of non-motorized modes of transportation such as walking and are heavily reliant on public transportation networks, particularly bus services. This necessitates long-term mobility strategies that balance planning with safety, convenience, and comfort for women and girls.
The issues in planning sustainable urban mobility that relies on NMT are multifaceted. To begin, transportation planning appears to be distributed across various, siloed departments, with no interaction with the city's overall urban planning procedures. Second, within urban transport planning, NMT planning has been generally disregarded or given only lip respect. Third, there appears to be a complete dearth of a feminist approach in thinking about mobility design and planning that includes girls, women, and gender minorities.
Why do we need a feminist perspective to urban transportation planning?
Gender influences access to the city; women experience the city significantly differently than males, which is exacerbated by other aspects of identification such as age, handicap, class, caste, religion, and sexuality, to name a few. Mobility, like space, is an embodied experience involving a dynamic interplay between physical bodies and material locations across time, with each of us altering the roles we occupy as we move.
As a result, when planning for sustainable urban mobility, one must consider people-centric, multi-modal transport in an integrated manner, with a focus on the requirements of women and girls in their daily lives.
Feminists have long emphasized how patriarchal gender roles cause women to be disproportionately burdened with unpaid household duties and care work, even if they work outside the home. A person's social roles have a major impact on differences in trip purpose, trip distance, transportation mode, and other characteristics of travel behavior, time of travel, and destination disparities.
In India, women's use of public space is characterized by complex trip-chaining, which is defined as a series of short trips linked together between main or primary destinations, such as a trip in which a woman leaves home, stops to drop a child at a daycare center, stops for grocery shopping, and then heads to her workplace or returns home.
Understanding the usage of urban space and activities done in this environment will be dependent on everyday life experiences of city dwellers, and it becomes critical to investigate how these places respond to the everyday needs of people, particularly girls and women. This is why Feminist Urban Planning, an approach to urban development that takes into account the concerns of many socioeconomic groups, is so important.
Sustainable Urban Development and Feminist Urbanism: Affinity
As an environmentally conscientious alternative to urban expansion, sustainable urban development strategies suggest adopting a 'compact city' model or the 15-minute city. This concept is also supported by feminist urban planners, who advocate for compact, mixed-use, and varied neighborhoods that allow women to locate inexpensive housing, work, and access childcare all in the same area. We can ensure that cities are developed and designed to be environmentally conscious, gender-inclusive, and promote participatory planning approaches by taking a feminist urbanism approach to sustainable city planning.
A Feminist Approach to Mobility Planning
Govind Gopakumar, Assistant Professor in the Centre for Engineering in Society (CES) at Concordia University, discusses the phenomena of an automobility being constructed in the city that caters to the mobility demands of the wealthy elites while simultaneously marginalizing the mobility needs of the rest, based on his work in Bengaluru. In the process, it encodes in mobility regimes the mobility needs of the dominant urban, male, and privileged sectors, at the expense of the diversified experience of different people navigating the city. This has serious consequences for the movement of girls, women, and gender minorities, resulting in their exclusion from the metropolis.
A feminist approach to mobility infrastructure prioritizes non-motorized transport (NMT) infrastructure such as pedestrian and cycling infrastructure, as well as the promotion of free or low-cost public transportation, particularly quality bus transportation with adequate frequency, connectivity, and well-maintained and designed bus stops. The plan of the Government of New Delhi to make all public transport free for women and girls on request is an excellent example of such a programme. This promotes women and girls to use public transport, making these venues safer and more accessible to them, allowing them to be more autonomous. Similarly, it encourages the use of low-carbon public transit over private vehicle use.
Cities' physical and social infrastructure must be constructed to be truly inclusive and equitable if they are to be truly inclusive and equitable. Cities should have well-designed and easily accessible public transportation, as well as well-lit streets, large sidewalks, public hospitals, and child-care facilities, among other amenities. Women's experiences of cities in India continue to differ greatly from those of men; a lack of fair infrastructure limits their capacity to move around and engage freely in the city. Even the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, adopted in 2015, include a demand to make cities more inclusive, safe, and resilient, with an emphasis on women and girls in particular.
According to a 2019 study, Indian cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru are among the world's least inclusive and fair. Vidhi's ongoing research examines cities from a feminist viewpoint in order to ensure that Bengaluru's urban planning and public spaces are attentive to the demands of women. This article examines how cities and their design are frequently riddled with gender prejudices, and it recommends strategies to develop more egalitarian cities.
What an 'equitable' city should have;
a) Physical Infrastructure: Streets that are well-lit, pathways, free public bathrooms that are open 24 hours a day, parks, and benches.
b) Community housing, refuge homes, public child-care facilities, and skill development centers are examples of social infrastructure.
c) Mobility Infrastructure: Free or low-cost public transportation, notably high-quality bus service with enough regularity and connectivity, as well as well-maintained bus stops.
d) Public hospitals and reproductive health facilities, mental health facilities, legal assistance centers, and one-stop crisis centers are examples of institutional infrastructure.
Gender inequality in cities: A critical assessment
A city's people do not share a common, universal urban experience. Differences in class, caste, religion, sexuality, age, handicap, and marital status, among other things, frequently result in a combination of forms of exclusion in the city, impacting their ability to access, traverse, and participate in it. Furthermore, not all women experience cities in the same way. The utilization of urban space and the activities conducted in cities are influenced by everyday life experiences, and it is critical to analyze how the city responds to people's everyday needs. Currently, the cities that do not fulfill the needs of women as indicated above become hostile and discriminate against them.
How can cities be truly welcoming?
Legal and policy interventions could help to establish more egalitarian cities. Gender inclusive processes must be initiated first. This is far from the case in cities such as Bengaluru.
In Bengaluru, the mandate for urban planning is held by the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA), a parastatal institution with no people's representation, let alone women being consciously involved in the process. Municipal laws must be updated to incorporate participatory planning and design processes that respect women and girls as empowered partners with shared decision-making power. A good example is the Catalan Neighbourhood Law, which was passed in 2004. The integration of a gender perspective in the design of urban places and facilities is required, with funding for projects under the law reliant on including gender equality, among other things.
Local governments in India can promote more representation in cities by:
1. Gathering precise gender disaggregated or gender sensitive data.
2. Facilitating focus group talks to determine the interests of women
3. Conducting neighborhood safety audits
4. Involving women's groups in community mapping to identify needs and service provision in local communities.
Conclusion: A 'Feminist Urbanism' approach
The concept of 'Feminist Urbanism,' which focuses on developing equitable cities by allocating resources and services fairly to diverse social groups, particularly women and sexual minorities, is a useful tool for urban planning. It argues for creating streets and public places that encourage women to occupy the city, as well as designing services that meet the needs of women, transgender, and gender-queer people. These methods and techniques could go a long way towards realizing women's right to cities and providing equal opportunities for them.
By Kaushiki Ishwar
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