Gender and the Built Environment Database
The Changing Shape of Gender and the Built Environment in the UK
In 2005 the architectural newspaper Building Design ran a campaign in its pages entitled 50/50. This asked architectural practices to sign up to for a charter aimed at increasing the number of women architects to half of the profession as a whole. The campaign highlighted that the number of women working in architecture was actually dropping at the same time as more women were entering architectural education than ever before.
As feminists involved in architecture we probably should been pleased to see a popular architectural journal leading such a campaign. But it was also depressing. Nearly 30 years after Jos Boys had started studying architecture - nearly 20 years for Katie Lloyd Thomas - the battle hadn't changed. The question still wasn't how could women change the way architecture is practised (now that women were finally part of the architectural profession), find new imaginative and innovative ways of making space and involve people in the processes of design. It wasn't even ‘why do women leave architecture in droves, when they stay in law or medicine despite all the difficulties?'
Care label from Taking Place's The Other Side of waiting Project
It was just ‘how can we make sure women are equally represented in the profession? How can they become equal to men?' We can't give up on the idea that women's involvement as architects, planners, designers, builders, building procurers, clients and users is not just about being ‘equal with men' but could radically critique, transform and improve the ways in which we make the built environment. Architecture has hardly ever had women in any of these roles and certainly not women with any voice. What could it become if we can finally make use of our own, diverse, ways of inhabiting, understanding and producing space? And what could architecture learn from some of the women who want to find ways to work and design ‘differently'?
In the 1970s, Jos was part of a group of women in London which ‘broke away' from a pro-unionisation group called the New Architecture Movement (NAM), to explore women's issues. At that time words like sexism didn't exist and it was hard to even imagine a way of operating which could reveal how built space wasn't neutral or objective, but in fact patterned so as to frame women's lives differently to men.
When Matrix - the feminist architects' and research practice that developed from this group - was set up at the end of the 1970s, it was still possible to map gender roles in the UK onto physical space as patterns of binary opposition and separation (women at home in the suburbs/men at work in the city); it was even easier to look back to 19th century Victorian England and see how these attempts to articulate gender difference through the design and control of material space had been developed. In their book, Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment, some of the women from Matrix began to unravel some of the ways in which such patterning was perpetuated as obvious and unproblematic and to highlight the aspects which were, in fact, persistently problematic for many women (Matrix 1984). Matrix also worked with women's and community groups on the design of new and innovative types of building for women, for example, the Jagonari Asian Women's Centre in Whitechapel, London.
This work was strongly influenced by American feminism, particularly in the writing of Dolores Hayden, Gwendolyn Wright and Susan Saegert. Of course, by the 1980s many feminists were already aware of starting from an oversimplified analysis centred on the white, middle-class housewife - what was called "the problem with no name" - by American Betty Freidan in The Feminine Mystique, and which made invisible the diverse and intersecting experiences of class, race, age, sexuality and disability. Other campaigning work such as the GLC Women and Planning guidelines Changing Places and publications produced by WDS began to develop a finer grained understanding of how the actual experiences of different groups of women were affected by design of the built environment.
But by the 1990s, many were questioning an approach which tended to focus on equality for women with men, or focused on ‘women's' problems. An all female artists' and architects' practice called muf deliberately refused any simplistic framings of their work as feminist and/or feminine (muf 2001). Now led by Liza Fior and Katherine Clarke (www.muf.co.uk), muf is interested in ‘the relationships between the built and the lived' as a public realm and in ‘another order of events beneath the visible' by developing methods for engaged practice from specific situations, which take a much more ‘sideways' and playful take on gender and space than the earlier generation of feminists.
In this, muf were engaging with wider theoretical and creative shifts. Ideas and attitudes were increasingly moving away from the Anglo-American feminism that had influenced Matrix and towards a European, particularly French feminist tradition, which emphasised ‘sexual difference' and ‘ecriture feminine' and explored difference itself as a form of practice, one that could include multiple voices, feminist, political, poetic and personal. Katie, as an architectural student in the 1980s, turned to these French feminists and to the few architectural writers who were exploring the openings their work might raise for design - Catherine Ingraham, Jennifer Bloomer, Kath Shonfield - amongst others. In their readings, feminism does not only have to be interested in women's issues and can explore areas not framed by conventional ideas of women's ‘place' in the built environment. Feminism becomes a critical tool with which to re-evaluate the underlying assumptions of architectural practice and theory, to make critical interventions into conventional understandings of space, representation and design practices, and into the broader questions of identity and subjectivity. Productive new possibilities are opened up, which may be playful and disruptive enactments ‘on and out of', not merely in reaction to, gendered space. Doina Petrescu has described this as a transition from feminist politics to poetics (Petrescu 2007).
Katie, Jos and others are now part of an artists/architects group called taking place (www.takingplace.org.uk) which we say (8 years on) explores feminist spatial practice. Taking place is a shifting intergenerational group of women; some of us came from the first wave of feminism in architecture, the campaigning for equal representation and the careful work of consultation with women's groups; and some of us had come from the ‘second wave' of creative feminist theorising. Through working together as taking place we have found ways of working together which come not from saying what we believe collectively, but are generated through rather than in spite of the differences between ourselves and those we participate with.
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Above, L-R: Places We've Been, Things We've Seen & The Homerton Tree, from The Other Side of Waiting project
Again, we are perhaps part of wider moves in contemporary feminism - and in architectural practices more generally - away from issues of representation and identity and towards an engagement with the diverse and performative qualities of our social and spatial practices. In our current project, ‘The Other Side of Waiting', for and with the Mother and Baby unit at Homerton Hospital in East London, taking place members have each differently responded to and re-valued aspects of the everyday conventional routines of childbirth, and are proposing a variety of ephemeral and permanent interventions into the space. In moving away form temporary interventions in academic and art institutions, towards longer term processes and artworks in an explicitly gendered space new questions are raised for us which leave us addressing again what feminist spatial practice may be.
Jos Boys and Katie Lloyd Thomas
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