ABSTRACT
In this chapter I will rerun the spool and consider how urban sociological perceptions of women and their needs have been reflected in the planners’ world view, by drawing illustrations from The Planner. I will also make observations drawn from my own life experience as a previous inner city resident to illustrate ‘the problem’, thus see-sawing from the public to the private realm. To reiterate, this should not be seen as an interruption but as a mainstream theme because personal accounts are integral components in post-modernist feminist sociology (Stanley and Wise, 1993). In the 1950s urban sociology was given a new lease of life as researchers studied the effects of slum clearance and rehousing on people’s lives (for example, Young and Willmott, 1957). There were also studies of the communities in the post-war new and expanded towns (Aldridge, 1979; Stacey, 1960). Incidentally, Margaret Stacey was one of the few women sociological researchers to be published in her own right in those days. Later she became a second-wave feminist writer (Stacey and Price, 1981). However, in general, urban sociology was so highly gendered and classed that it did little for ‘women and planning’. Arguably urban sociology reinforced planners’ patriarchal view of society, albeit from a new aspatial, as against traditional spatial viewpoint. Up until the mid-1960s, at least, planners appeared to hold unrealistic, sentimental images of urban life, which were subsequently replaced, following a period of urban unrest, by somewhat more realistic images of the different types of people who make up society including, eventually, ‘real women’.
