Gender mainstreaming

By Margaux, 14 September, 2023

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Kick-off, perspective.brussels

Perspective engages in a reflection on Brussels' urban planning through the lens of gender, initiating a gender mainstreaming strategy within its missions. The goal is to integrate gender-differentiated realities and experiences into planning tools and urban policies, expanding access to the city's resources and spaces.

Gender mainstreaming is approached here as a transversal strategy, mobilizing various areas of action: territorial development, urban renovation and programming, public facilities (schools, childcare centers, sports, socio-health, and cultural infrastructures), mobility, accessibility, and safety. These levers represent key challenges in ensuring a more inclusive right to the city.

To carry out this work, Perspective has appointed Karbon’ (urbanism and planning), in collaboration with Muriel Sacco (Gender and Sexuality Workshop, ULB), Victor Laco (gender and sexuality expert), and Eva Kail (Viennese urban planner and pioneer of gender mainstreaming). Their combined expertise will allow for the development of an analysis rooted in local dynamics and will explore the intersections between gender, space, and power within the Brussels territory.

To celebrate the launch of the project and this significant step in the evolution of perspectives on urban planning, Perspective is organizing an inaugural event, featuring a conference and a small exhibition, at 59 Rue de Namur, 1000 Brussels.

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Urban and territorial planning – through the various urban issues it addresses, as well as its tools and scales of action – impacts the use of the city at multiple levels.

Despite the imagery of freedom often associated with it, the city remains 'a reflection of dominant social norms and standardized, often exclusionary, social, economic, urban, and landscape dynamics' (Luxembourg and Messaoudi, 2017). Thus, as in several spheres of social, professional, or family life, urban spaces and their uses are shaped by gendered social relations. These relations most often favor men, to the detriment of women and LGBTQIA+ people.

The urban socio-spatial structure, in this sense, is imbued with a hierarchy of gender relations, within which planning processes play a crucial role. Integrating gender mainstreaming into these processes requires, in our view, an approach that is attentive to local dynamics. This diagnostic will rely on qualitative surveys with field actors, territorial and statistical analyses, as well as data from Perspective and regional organizations.

In the context of Brussels, marked by the intersection of multiple forms and sources of spatial inequalities and discrimination, an intersectional approach is essential. By considering gender, sexualities, class, ethnicity, age, and disability, this approach allows for a more nuanced understanding of urban experiences and highlights the power relations that shape them. It thus avoids reducing gender to an isolated lens or contributing to mechanisms of stigmatization of marginalized groups.

This project contributes to enriching Perspective’s expertise by refining its understanding of urban spaces through an intersectional framework, and strengthening its role in defining the strategic orientations of Brussels' territorial development.

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Date

Thu, 09/14/2023 - 12:00

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