ABSTRACT
Recent scholarly writing and other social commentaries on ‘women and the city’ fall into three discrete categories.
There is, first, a body of literature which is concerned with the impact of the city as a material structure on women (cf. for example Bowlby 1984; Holcomb 1984; McDowell 1983). This literature focuses particularly on ways in which buildings, street layout or other facilitiesnearly always designed and constructed by male architects and male engineers-have been more or less attentive to what in England and other western societies have been defined as ‘women’s needs’, like the problems faced by mothers of small children trying to obtain access to a building with a pram (cf. Green et al. 1987; Little et al. 1988; Pickup 1988). This particular approach also includes, however, an ongoing critique, well known to women over many years, of the design and location of what in Britain are called, rather coyly, ‘public conveniences’ for women (McKie and Edwards 1995).
