ABSTRACT

Multiple approaches to engendering safer and more inclusive urban spaces for women now exist, with city governments, planners and urban citizens across the world advocating for and adopting initiatives to create new urban paradigms where urban spaces are inclusive of the diverse needs and aspirations of all citizens. The importance of gender-specific approaches to urban spaces has evolved from a dominant and problematic approach to urban safety that has historically left women’s needs off local and inter- national agendas. Spatial and urban planning, as one particular approach to safe cities, has often disadvantaged women because of a failure to recognize that women and men have different needs and experiences in cities, as well as different concerns about how these needs are met. Liberal approaches to women in cities have seen the development, in the last twenty years, of numerous progressive and varying approaches to the public-policy fields of urban transport and planning, for example. Gender mainstreaming is one such approach developed to address women’s concerns, although it engenders significant criticisms that question the extent to which using gender as a single axis of oppression can be truly transformative of women’s everyday and diverse experiences of exclusion.