Re-imaging Indian cities as a space of inclusion

World leaders’ 2030 Agenda sets 17 ambitious Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), spotlighting gender equality and empowering women and girls. Among them, SDG 11 envisions vibrant, inclusive, and sustainable cities, brimming with accessible green spaces and transport systems that caters to everyone, especially women, children, the elderly, and people with disabilities. These SDGs aim to create dynamic urban environments where everyone can thrive and actively participate in city life.

Despite this widespread recognition of the fact that in order to make our cities sustainable, it is important to ensure that everyone, irrespective of their gender, can easily access cities and have their social, economic, and political needs met, the way our cities are planned and organized seem to work better for heterosexual, able-bodies, cisgender men than they do for women, girls, sexual and gender minorities, and people with disabilities. Urban planning and design quite literally shape the environment around us, and this very environment, in turn shapes how we live, work, play, move, and rest. The purpose of this blog is to bring readers’ attention towards this planning failure and makes a humble attempt to provide with some policy solutions that can be explored to fix this problem.

As our cities are exclusively designed to cater to the needs of able-bodied men and sometimes even from a gender neutral lens, overtime has led us to believe and come to terms with this distorted reality that cities are meant to be the way they are now. We seem to accept that public washroom facilities for women will be shut down post 9 pm or would be highly inaccessible because women are expected to be in their homes post their curfew time of 7 pm, that parks would be built in a way that have ideal ground for playing football and not the sports that girls enjoy playing, that it normal to experience one incident of sexual violence against women while traveling in public buses, and so on. These instances are easy to capture under different rubrics of the built urban environment around us. The first one is the problem of access as when residential areas are often built at the periphery of cities and often with very little or no access to public transport, it becomes difficult for women to venture out for work. Most of these women do not own private cars which further aggravates the problem and they are stuck doing unpaid caregiving work at home while men venture out in order to provide for the family. Other challenges include health and hygiene facilities or the lack thereof. Women are often about using public toilets that are located in secluded, unsafe spots and they are often unsanitary. Hygiene is also a cause of great concern among women, especially when menstruators have to consider accessing a clean bathroom when it comes to changing their menstrual products. Non-gender-responsive water, hygiene, and sanitation or WASH policies circumvent the economic and social implications of hygienic sanitation facilities on women and women’s access to public toilets is also a part of their larger access to public spaces.

There is no one policy antidote that can fix these issues other than a systemic change in the manner our cities are planned. Cities have to be looked at through a gendered lens and this understanding has to develop that women experience cities differently than men and their needs will also have to be taken care of if we are serious about increasing women labor force participation.

This calls for a participatory approach while planning transport routes, reconfiguration of public spaces like streets and parks and other urban spaces. One has to bear in mind that this is not a women specific problem, but this should be addressed as a larger question around inclusion and equal access to opportunities for everyone.

While it is a well-recognized fact ULBs lack the mandate of performing a lot of municipal functions that were supposed to be devolved to them under the 74th constitutional amendment and even if they have the mandate to perform certain functions, they lack the resources to do it. Under circumstances like these, providing for basic amenities becomes a challenge and takes precedence over quality of life and safety and this gender based experience of people is often overlooked, it is important to realize full potential of organizing ward committee meetings and this could in some ways allow women, who otherwise remain underrepresented politically, and other minority gender groups to air their concerns and voice their opinions on what they think an ideal city should look like. As mentioned above, initiatives like ward committees and even area sabhas are some of the initiatives that the 74th amendment has equipped us with but these are not utilized as they should be.

Many have pitched for the need of having compact cities that are characterized by transit-oriented development (TOD), an urban planning strategy that focuses on locating residential, business, and leisure spaces within walking distance of public transportation. According to the Institute for Transportation and development policy, planning strategy like this would bring people, activities, buildings, and public space together, with easy walking and cycling connections between them and the nearest transit service in the city. This idea goes against urban sprawl where residential areas are generally located at the periphery of the city and one has to travel to the city in order to work. Urban sprawl requires the regular usage of private vehicles like cars and near the nearest transit facilities are located at a considerable distance. In this case, it becomes difficult for women to travel for work or even for caregiving activities. Women are known to make multiple trips the day for the said purposes and in most cases they are more likely to use transit, cycle or they would rather walk to fulfill their travel needs and their travel patterns are strongly influenced by considerations like density, mix of land uses and urban design and the existing environmental, social and land-use conditions make it very for women to commute to the city without cars. In this case, TOD looks like an ideal strategy as it has a dense development with land use diversity (mixing residences with commercial and other facilities) and a walkable/ cyclable urban design. This way we can at least ease the travel burden on women.