ABSTRACT
Female engagement in urban politics and governance is not just a fundamental right, but an integral and potentially major route to gender equality in urban environments. Accordingly, the importance of active involvement by women in civic participation has been stressed, inter alia, by UN-Habitat in its Gender Equality Action Plan (UN-Habitat, 2008b; see also UN-Habitat, 2010b). Given that the hub of national politics and protest is usually urban-based (see Beall and Fox, 2009; Beall et al., 2010; Dyson, 2010; Mitlin and Satterthwaite, 2013), the fact that women’s parliamentary representation featured as one of the three main indicators in MDG3 – to ‘promote gender equality and empower women’ – was arguably a step in the right direction. Moreover, that there is a suggested expanded indicator within the proposed SDG5 which calls for increasing the ‘percentage of seats held by women and minorities in national parliament and/or sub-national elected office according to their respective share of the population’ (UNSDN, 2015:27) signifies a gratifying strengthening of commitment in this domain.
