ABSTRACT
In 1995, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action affirmed that equality between women and men is a human right and necessary for social justice. Later, in 2015, the UN defined gender equality as one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals to transform the world. During all these years, gender and urban space have been the subject of studies, research, interventions, reflections, and discussions worldwide but also in Latin America and the Caribbean region. Following the path of urban equality, this chapter presents a systematic review of the current predominant orientations in urban studies in Latin America and the Caribbean, organized according to three thematic axes, which are of utmost importance in the built environment: fear and insecurity, care, and mobility, putting special emphasis on the differences that gender constructs in the ways of conceiving the space and the city, the definition of women as research subjects, and gender as a category of urban analysis. A systematic and rigorous review of the available evidence is carried out. For this purpose, we set three stages of analysis. First, we examine the theoretical and conceptual debates around the incorporation of gender in urban studies. Second, we turn our attention to empirical studies that point to the centrality of the urban environment in gender analysis. In the last section, a review of the main institutional responses to mobility, insecurity, and care problems in the region is carried out, and manifold examples of interventions are presented. Our study shows that to achieve better results, gender equality needs to be reinforced by a participatory design approach involving all stakeholders, it needs to be achieved in all areas influencing urban and transport planning, and finally, specific measures should be implemented to reduce the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
