Closing gaps between men and women, boys and girls is central to the sustainable development goals, and achieving gender equity is a core principle guiding the resources and information available in this handbook.
Executive Summary: Urban planning and design quite literally shape the environment around us — and that environment, in turn, shapes how we live, work, play, move, and rest. As such, the processes of planning and design have a direct relationship with the structures and behaviors that define our societies, often both reflecting and reinforcing the inequities within them. While it is almost universally understood that women, girls, people with disabilities, and sexual and gender minorities face significant social and economic disadvantages when compared with able-bodied, cisgender, heterosexual men, what is still not fully understood and accepted among many planning and design practitioners is exactly how conditions in the built environment — and the lack of diversity in the voices shaping it — feed into and perpetuate gender inequity.
In general, cities work better for heterosexual, able-bodied, cisgender men than theydo for women, girls, sexual and gender minorities, and people with disabilities. Keyaspects of the built urban environment – related to access, mobility, safety and freedomfrom violence, health and hygiene, climate resilience, and security of tenure – createdisproportionate burdens for women, girls, and sexual and gender minorities of all ages and abilities, thus exacerbating and reinforcing existing gender inequities. Faced with challenges ranging from transportation services that prioritize commuting over caregiving, to the lack of lighting and toilets in public spaces, many feel inconvenienced, ill-at-ease, and unsafe inthe urban environment. These issues stem largely from the absence of women, girls, and sexual and gender minorities in planning and design decisions, leading to assumptions around their needs and the encoding of traditional gender roles within the built environment.
Over the past few decades, theorists and practitioners have begun to ask: how mightwe design and plan cities that work well for everyone? What would such a city looklike, and how would we go about creating it? However, with women and sexual and gender minorities still largely excluded from both the professional fields of planning and design, and from public decision-making processes around urban development, answering these questions in practical terms continues to pose a significant challenge.
The Handbook for Gender-Inclusive Urban Planning and Design aims to fill the gapbetween gender-inclusive policy and practice, and respond to the historic exclusionof women, girls, and sexual and gender minorities from the processes of urbanplanning and design. It clearly presents the economic and social case for gender inclusion in urban planning and design and provides practical guidelines on how to implement genderinclusive planning and design projects
