New York Times Image-Mansplaining Statue
Alissa Walker is a talented writer, Curbed.com’s Urbanism editor and lives in Los Angeles. In Curbed.com Alissa describes something that women in the planning, architectural or design professions know: despite the fact that roughly fifty per cent of the population are women, that is not reflected in the planning language used to describe place, or indeed the people who are talking, thinking, or writing about planning-they are mostly men. Now there was Jane Jacobs, and New York City’s amazing Janette Sadik-Khan, the former Commissioner of Transportation-but where are the other planning women and why are they not widely championed?
Alissa had been reading four books on gentrification, and found “Not only are these four books by men, they’re largely about men. According to the books themselves, the factors that have contributed to gentrification—displacement of marginalized communities, systemically ingrained racism, unequitable housing policy—have been largely implemented by powerful men over the last century.”
“It’s no secret that the lack of gender diversity is an issue for the architecture and development world. It’s also an issue for elected officials who initiate policy: Among U.S. cities with populations of over 30,000, only 20 percent of mayors are women. A 2015 report by the American Planning Association not only notes the lack of gender diversity in urban planning careers—the field is 42 percent female—but also the fact that women are more likely to be affected by urban affordability issues: Up to three-quarters of households living in public housing are solely headed by females.”
Alissa Walker looked at her own media contacts and how she got information about planning, and found that again her links were largely male. “Much of the content I consume daily about city-making is written and distributed by men… I see it at the conferences I attend. On the panels I participate in. In the Facebook groups I join. Even at the meetings where the decisions about neighborhoods are being made… A group of very white, very loud men have confirmed that they are, indeed, the problem when it comes to our cities, and now the conversation about how to fix them is mostly being conducted by very white, very loud men—who happen to be very active on social media.”
Alissa’s article includes a great list of books written by women on planning issues listed below. Quite simply in the twenty-first century we should be supporting not only gender equity in planning our cities, but ensuring that women’s voices in communities are heard and recognized. Reading Ms. Walker’s full article is a good place to start.
Must-Read Books About Cities by Women
Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism by Rebecca Solnit
Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places by Sharon Zukin
How Women Saved the City by Daphne Spain
Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London by Lauren Elkin
The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo by Saskia Sassen
A Black Urbanist by Kristen Jeffers
The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work and Family Life by Dolores Hayden
Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City by Mary Pattillo
Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era by Gail Radford
Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America’s Sorted-Out Cities by Mindy Thompson Fullilove
Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution by Janette Sadik-Khan and Seth Solomonow
Sex and the Revitalized City: Gender, Condominium Development, and Urban Citizenship by Leslie Kahn
Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space by Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Renia Ehrenfeucht
Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities by Leonie Sandercock
The Just City by Susan S. Fainstein
A Neighborhood That Never Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation, and the Search for Authenticity by Japonica Brown-Saracino
Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs by Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson
The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation by Natalie Moore
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Reblogged this on Sandy James Planner.
The core change in gender equality – yes, affirmative action – must be in the school system where 80% of the employees are women.
Same goes for the police and military livelihoods – 50% should be women – with preference given to those who do not have family in the business. If this were enacted globally, there would be an end to war.
Thank you Sandy for addressing this inequity, which sadly still prevails in too many quarters today. The Cro magnon elements are still with us as witnessed by the violence – too often against women — on the nightly news. This greatly tempers the measureable progress we have made over the last few generations.
In our supposedly enlightened society, Boomer’s parent’s generation saw the worst institutional paternalism amongst the people who are still with us. There was and still is no pension plan for child-rearing housewives. Many of our female elders become destitute when they lose their spouses without adequate life insurance and joint assets, where joint pension planning was absent, or sometimes when the husband controls all the financing.
Affordable public daycare has been on the agenda since Boomers started having babies and women populated the workplace. Maternity leave is now accompanied by paternity leave, but it’s still not equally balanced. Job sharing remains quite uncommon, and daycare is still “too expensive” according to many conservative and religious pundits who actively seek to suppress women’s aspirations. Too many corporations purposely create more menial, low-paying jobs designed for a majority of women (often single mothers) with few other choices or opportunities. These critics, directors and shareholders ignore the economic windfall to society of women working, spending their paycheques and paying taxes en masse.
Women’s contribution is massive, and that includes their intellectual output as demonstrated in the book list above and in the management structures, consultancies and boardrooms of many organizations.
Yet there remains much incomplete work. It may take generations for women to escape the cultural yokes that place them in secondary positions behind men, even those who are obviously smarter than the prevalent patriarchal mores allow.
https://cdn-blog.adafruit.com/uploads/2017/07/yousafzai-all-i-want-is-an-education-600×338.jpg
The Malala story is an inspiration.
And there’s a great presentation by Sakena Yacoobi on TED on how she stopped the Taliban from shutting down her school in Afghanistan. There’s a funny line when her bus was stopped by some scary men and they asked: What about us?
They too needed help.
As for where does the money for change come from? The greedy billionaires. Not to ask. Not to beg. To demand equity.
What goes through the mind of a billionaire when people line up at food banks? To pick up stale-dated products that were bought from these selfsame billionaires. It’s contemptible. Foodbank drives are a cruel farce.
We live in an economic dictatorship. The former USSR jailed political prisoners. Corporatocracies jail economic prisoners.
I recall seeing one sad soft-spoken Black man who was a victim of the three strikes you’re out policy. Doubtless he was guilty of transgressions in the past, but what put him away for life – life in jail in the Corporate State of America – was stealing something from Wal-Mart – some pittance from billionaires. Life in jail at enormous cost to the taxpayer, and tremendous profit to the corporate criminal system. Gulag America.
There is no gender inequity in most developed nations when careers start. Girls and boys, young men and young women ALL have the same schooling and chances. There is no systemic preferences by those hiring in my opinion.
Many just chose not to participate in certain professions. As such we have more female nurses, kindergarten teachers, physios, secretaries or waitresses, but more male truck drivers, pilots, captains or plumbers. Why is that ? No one is forced to become a nurse or a pilot ?
Can’t comment on the planning profession but I’d surmise that around 50% of students are female in architecture, urban planning & sciences .. although we do see more men in engineering. Probably a rough 50/50 in accounting, business, medicine, law etc ..
Let’s also not forget that women have babies, and not men. So if you take an equally qualified man and woman at say age 25 then on average by age 35 the woman has 1 or 2 kids and thus loses a year or 2 so the 35 year old man has 10 year work experience and the woman 8-9, and as such, on average, the man advances somewhat faster and/or higher just given that 10-20% difference, all things being equal. More women probably also drop out of workforce earlier, by choice in most cases in their late 30s or 40s, and/or due to kids and as such by age 45 or age 55 you’d see more men in higher ranks.
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The note by the commenter above is a classic example of Mansplaining.
Please enlighten me. Which facts are inaccurate ?
Are you suggesting affarmitaive action in trucking or hospitals too, against applicants wishes ?
None of your facts are inaccurate, or your arguments invalid. The term “mansplaining” is only applied when someone doesn’t have a valid counterargument other than to point out that the person making the argument is male. You *explained* something and you’re a *man*! Now that the argument has been labelled, it can be dismissed.
It can be dismissed. Men talk too damn much.
Maybe relook at maternity leave….the person is away….just absence of skills/talent and corporate memory is equivalent to a guy akin to taking a year’s leave (with or without pay depending on the guy’s employer).
By the way, to add some well-known female researchers. Kay Teske at UBC on cycling research in key Canadian cities. Her work is cited heavily. She has led in this area for Canada.
Re: maternity leave. An excellent point, Jean.
Thomas missed the part about decent, affordable daycare and how such equitable programs allows even poverty-stricken single parents to increase their lot in life through having more productive time to further their education and for career advancement. Society benefits immensely through more people working in higher paid positions and paying more taxes.
Unclear if state raised kids i.e. where kids are dropped for almost the entire day at pre-kindergarten environments beat a society where kids have at least one parent at home most or all of the time. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2296567/Scientific-proof-stay-home-mothers-benefit-children-So-coalition-Budget-tax-break-working-mothers.html or here https://www.focusonthefamily.com/parenting/parenting-roles/value-of-stay-at-home-moms/the-value-of-stay-at-home-moms or here https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/eric-bettinger-why-stay-home-parents-are-good-older-children
Personally I prefer an environment where the parents make that choice AND have more take-home pay through income splitting and/or child care 4s handed to them in cash so they decide what to do with this.
“… state-raised kids …”
Now there’s twisted logic for you. Professional daycare programs and the professionals that run them use professional teaching and child-minding criteria not unlike school curricula. The state provides grants and upholds standards that are often higher than the private sector, but not the curricula.
It’s one thing to drop your kids for 2-3 h once in a while while parents run errands. It’s another as a very young child to fight for attention for 8-10 h five times a week among a group of 12-25 other very young attention seekers with perhaps 2-4 teachers / child minders. That is where the child rearing falls apart with above linked result.
In our situation, my wife was the primary caregiver for the first 5-6 years of our children’s lives; after that it was me. There was never any thought of daycare; not that we could have afforded it anyway.
The idea of daycare, so that a parent can pursue a “career” is good in the abstract – it sounds better than “job”, but it’s better to provide a guaranteed annual income (there is a pilot project in Ontario), so the individual can decide what’s best for themselves and, more importantly, for their children. If that’s daycare, so be it. I’d rather take care of the kids.
The daycare we have used is the school system, but if we received that cash or credit instead of it going to this bureaucracy, we would have homeschooled and hired tutors for whatever suited our children’s interests. As an example, both of our kids are amazing at constructing worlds and navigating in Minecraft. Blows my mind what they do. Is that available in school? No. The school teachers don’t have a clue how to do it. Transitioning from Minecraft to architectural Sketchup is a logical step. Instead, my kids are taught what the school teachers know – and it’s mostly the same drivel I got a long pre-internet time ago.
Order of Canada recipient Pierre Berton said it well in his book: Smug Minority – that he was willing to fund people to stay at home and drink coffee and compose poetry if that’s what they wanted to do. Better for them to do that than wasting their days commuting to a career/job.
We’re having a hard time transitioning to a resource based economy – a library model if you will. How much of a person’s life is wasted working to pay for a vehicle, or objects that should be shared as they need them. Terry O’Reilly mentioned that a power drill is used an average of 13 minutes. Why work to pay to own?