Study trip to Vienna : Frauen Bauen Stadt !

By Margaux, 18 October, 2023

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Romina Cornejo Escudero, Margaux Walter

As part of the Gender Mainstreaming project led by Karbon’ for Perspective (Brussels Planning Agency), the team travelled to Vienna to analyse how the city has structured its development around gender-sensitive urban policies and measures.

Eva Kail, a key figure in Viennese gender planning, traced the history of this approach, detailing the administrative mechanisms that ensure its implementation. She also presented us with planning and development projects based on these guidelines, illustrating how the principles of Gender Mainstreaming are translated into urban planning.

This immersion was followed by a workshop bringing together Vienna (Austria), Brussels (Belgium) and Umeå (Sweden), a collective workspace designed to compare analyses and experiences and to outline prospects for the evolution of gender-sensitive urban policies.

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Vienna has been at the forefront of gender mainstreaming in urban planning for nearly thirty years. As early as 1991, the exhibition ‘Who Owns Public Spaces? Women’s Everyday Life in the City’ highlighted the specific needs of women in urban spaces through an analysis of eight daily routes. This approach emphasised the diversity of uses and identified ‘spaces of anxiety and comfort’, paving the way for a structural reflection on urban planning.

The success of the exhibition led to the creation of the Frauenbüro (Women's Office) in 1992, headed by Eva Kail, followed in 1998 by the Coordination Office for Planning and Construction Geared to the Requirements of Daily Life and Specific Needs of Women. Between 2005 and 2010, the city implemented around 60 pilot projects integrating a gender-sensitive approach at various levels of planning. This strategy not only allowed for rapid experimentation with solutions, but also legitimised the integration of gender into urban planning in the eyes of political decision-makers.

These initial experiments led to the development of the Manual for Gender Mainstreaming in Urban Planning and Urban Development, a reference document that capitalises on the lessons learned from the projects carried out and defines urban guidelines and strategies to frame the design of the city and reinvent its uses.

This trip to Vienna gave us the opportunity to observe in concrete terms how these initiatives are taking shape in urban space and to question the architectural and urban forms they produce. The aim is not to transpose a model, but to question the conditions under which these policies emerge, their spatial translation and the forms of governance that support them. Given the situation in Brussels, which has a very different socio-spatial structure from Vienna and is characterised by other political legacies and ways of thinking about the city, this trip provides a starting point for formulating a localised diagnosis and furthering our reflection on the tools, scales and modes of action that can be mobilised in other contexts.

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