A city is a place where we live. It is a physical built space with infrastructure, public space, transportation, housing, places where we work… It is where social life takes place, and it has a materiality.

City planners can support gender equality by taking it into consideration the specificity of women’s lives in the way they plan, the way they propose projects in cities, the way they design urban space.

Women use the city in different ways men do — we know that through statistics, and it is not a normative way of understanding, but it is the reality of what is happening today. What the data tell us it is that, on a daily basis, women perform most of the tasks that are needed for the support of daily life, for the reproduction of life, for the care of others and particularly of those who cannot move autonomously in the city, of the young and the elderly, or the sick, or the handicapped.

Taking this into account, planners can contribute to gender quality by looking in which ways cities can better respond to those specific ways of using and and living in the city. For instance, by designing spaces that allow for better caretaking of kids and the elderly, by designing spaces that can be perceived for women as safe spaces — this is very subjective, but we have to understand that women stop going to places when they perceive that they are not safe.

These are ways planners and designers can improve gender equality in the city.

‘Mobility of care’ is a concept that I coined in the year 2008, and that was the result of a project I did for the Spanish Ministry of Transportation. They asked me to analyze the main transportation services in the country from a gender perspective, and I found a number of biases in the concepts and the way they were analyzing the data and collecting the data.

After a while, I realized that if we look at the purposes for travel and the way that those transportation services were analyzing the purpose for travel — like employment, education, shopping, strolling, visiting, escorting —, many of those purposes for travel are trips that mostly women do for the care of others: when you go shopping, when you go visiting someone, when you go strolling, when you accompany someone… Many of these trips are not leisure trips. They are not done for personal purposes, they are done for the care of others and for the upkeep of the home.

This is how I came up with this idea of giving an umbrella term, a category for analyzing mobility that gathers all these trips under one single name: ‘mobility of care‘. So it is a category that allows us to quantify and to make visible the trips that people do for the upkeep of life and the caring of others in the city.

The concept of mobility of care impacts gender equality by putting at the forefront the idea that the trips that adult individuals do for taking care of others and for the upkeep of the home are important because they are many, and they are almost as many as employment-related mobility. We have empirical evidence about this fact, which means that the priorities of investment in transportation systems and how they are managed have to include care as an important objective of the policy.

And this will necessarily lead to outputs in terms of the use of the transportation systems that provide better solutions to women’s needs in the city to care tasks because the policy will be more responsive to it. So that is one way in which mobility of care can contribute to a greater gender equality, because it will lead to create transportation systems that help women get into the labor force by improving the way that all care tasks can be performed in the city.

Because of their size, medium-sized cities are much better equipped to create the conditions for gender equality. It is a pre-condition that helps in that, because in medium-sized cities everything is closer.

First, they have a good level of provisional services, which are needed for everyday life, and then because they are not very big, the time spent in getting to places is smaller than in big metropolitan areas. And then I would say that cities that have carried out successful and efficient policies that have integrated gender considerations into their built environment — into housing, transportation, public space, etc.

There, Vienna is the the the example. They are the ones that have been doing it for almost 30 years now, and they have very important pilot projects in housing — for example, those by my colleague Franziska Ullmann —, in designing public spaces taking into consideration what boys and girls of different ages need and how they use space, and their relative interests in using those spaces.

l I think that there is a momentum for considering gender and women in the city. That is in the public conversation, but now it needs to move into actual transformation of policy and planning. And planning cities, by its very nature, is not short term — 10 years is a very short time span for things to change in a substantial way.

However, we have done the first step, which is that nobody would say today that it is not important and necessary to look at gender and women’s issues in the city. That is the most important thing. Once everybody has agreed on that, and I think everybody has, it is about moving into actual projects and plans. It will take time, but we are in the way to it.