Gender Equity in Cities
SPATIAL DESIGN | WORKSHOP
How does it feel to navigate through spaces that aren’t designed for you?
In 2018, as part of the London Design Festival, we launched the Gender Equity in Cities, exploring how urban design impacts gender equity and social norms. The conference with a temporary pavilion, accompanied a week-long series of events, focused on creating more inclusive cities. We addressed issues such as public transport, housing, and spaces for marginalised communities through an international lens from experiences in Stockholm, Sweden to Beirut, Lebanon and back to London.
OVERVIEW
ROLE
Team: Migrant’s Bureau
Build & Programme: Temporary
Status: Completed
Client: Migrant’s Bureau (Self-funded & Crowdsourced with a match funder)
Location: London Bridge, London
London Design Festival | 2018
How does it feel to navigate through spaces that aren’t designed for you?
How can we make our cities more inclusive? And, how can we encourage the next generation to consider more individuals when designing and planning local and global communities?
Driven by these questions, we had embarked on our first built project - the Gender Equity in Cities conference, which was also part of London Design Festival 2018. For this, we designed and built the pavilion alongside a week-long programme of events, which was opened by our day-long event.
Our conference examined how rapid rates of urban growth and new ways of living have both exacerbated and remedied gender based issues. This highlighted key aspects of urban living and their influence on complex social norms. Issues ranging from the impact of effective public transport in ensuring positive social mobility, strategies to design more inclusive public realm through policy, radical housing with queer communities and the impact it can have tackling loneliness for women, men and non-binary/trans communities within spaces in cities.
Initial drawings
The pavilion for the Gender Equity in Cities (GEC) conference was designed and built to host a series of events highlighting inclusive urban design. After the event, the pavilion was donated to the Shakespeare Walk Adventure Playground in East London, continuing its impact in the community.
Pavillion
In addition to our one day event, we organised a week-long series of events, live podcasts and workshops that aimed to continue the points of discussion raised and develop new perspectives on issues that we might have missed.
Programme
Our programme included:
[Roundtable] The Voice of Women: Resistance, Power, & The Biological Clock.
[Panel Discussion] Transport and Gender In The City: Your Service has been delayed!
[Roundtable] LGBTQAI+ in the city: Concepts Of Space & Resistance In The Middle East.
[Panel Discussion] Safety In Numbers: Integrating Support Structures in housing & safe spaces.
[Panel Discussion] Women and Children First! Designing Models for Inclusivity.
[Panel Discussion] GEC: Where do we go from here?
[Live Podcast] Well Blactually feat. Elsie Owusu.
[Live Workshop] Play The City: Changing the way we engage with stakeholders.
[Live Workshop] Mosaic Mena: LGBTQAI+ Refugees on displacement and social inclusion.
[Live Workshop] Queer Direct: Examining the reaction to heteropatriachy.
After the end of the week, the pavilion was dissembled. The pavillion was later donated to the Shakespeare Walk Adventure Playground, in East London.