ABSTRACT

The Royal Town Planning Institute’s 75th Anniversary Brochure (RTPI, 1989a: 11) shows a photograph of the Institute’s Presidential Badge worn on the chain of office. Designed in 1924, by a woman, Mrs Winny Austin, (Cherry, 1974: 114) the brochure states the badge ‘shows a female “genius of the city” holding the shields of architecture and engineering’. Likewise, the sculpting of a portrait bust of the grandfather of British town planning, Ebenezer Howard, was entrusted to a Miss Ivy Young (Howard, 1898 [1960]: plate opposite p. 49). On buying Howard’s book in 1967, having just entered a town planning course, after spending one year at a predominantly female art college studying three dimensional design, I identified with the woman in the photograph, imagining her at work creating Ebenezer Howard. But, when I embarked on a town planning degree, at an overwhelmingly male white-heat-of-technology 1960s university1, I found that the apparent prominence of women in the iconography of the profession was misleading. The presidential badge has been worn by only one woman in the history of the profession, Sylvia Law (1974-5). Hazel McKay became the second woman president, in 1994. In a profession so dominated by the influence of the forefathers of town planning such as Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier, no women have gained equal recognition in urban design. Indeed, many feminists argue it is impossible for there to be such a thing as a female genius within patriarchal society (Battersby, 1989).