Gladys We picked up on this Atlantic Cities piece on How to design a city for women.
Gender mainstreaming has been in place in the Austrian capital since the early 1990s. In practice, this means city administrators create laws, rules and regulations that benefit men and women equally. The goal is to provide equal access to city resources. And so far, officials say it’s working.
Vienna has adopted gender mainstreaming in a number of areas of city administration, including education and health care policy. But nowhere has it had more of an impact than on the field of urban planning. More than sixty pilot projects have been carried out to date. As the size and scale of these projects increase, gender mainstreaming has become a force that is literally reshaping the city.
Vienna is probably the most appropriate city in the world to lead this long-overdue direction, given its history in the late 19th century when the medieval walls came down and people, women in particular, didn’t know how to experience or act in the expansive new public spaces being created on the Ringstrasse. Agoraphobia was the term coined by none other than the Viennese doctor Freud who counseled many of these women.
For those of your readers with an urbanist interest – aren’t they all? – Camillo Sitte, an influential Viennese art professor of that day, is sadly overlooked for his insightful analyses of historical squares and propositions for new squares and plazas. A whole university course could be devoted to his writings.