South Philly resident Camille Boggan, a program associate for the National Association of City Transportation Officials, can pinpoint exactly one of the moments that started her thinking about the importance of urban planning in creating a city that everyone can live in comfortably.
She recalls waiting for a bus near her apartment on Washington Avenue, and feeling acutely uncomfortable. Cars were whizzing by, some honking or yelling at people waiting for the bus. The corner was poorly lit, without any kind of shelter. Only a small SEPTA sign even indicated where the bus stop actually is.
“You’re just so visible in a way that feels uncomfortable, especially as a woman because you’re just standing there by yourself. There’s no shelter. There’s no bench,” says Boggan, who is a member of the transit steering committee of 5th Square, Philadelphia’s urbanist political action committee. That feeling—that public transit is unsafe or inaccessible for women—inspired Boggan.
“I was like, I want to do something about this because this is ridiculous. I really want to make sure that people can use something that is supposed to be a public service reliably,” Boggan says.
“If you look out your window at a city that you live in anywhere around the world, it’s likely everything that you’re looking at and living in and moving through has been designed and managed by men,” says Katrina Johnston-Zimmerman
The barriers to this are plenty in Philly. Like the stop near Boggan’s apartment, many bus stops lack shelters to protect from the weather, or benches for passengers to sit on while they wait. Many train stations, including the busy Frankford Transportation Center, have “leaners” instead of benches, which makes it hard for people to rest when they may be carrying groceries or children during their travels. In 2019, only about half of SEPTA’s subway and regional rail had elevators and many of them experienced frequent outages, making it difficult for parents traveling with strollers to predict whether they would have access to a station.
All of these issues affect women especially, in large part because women’s needs are still closely tied to the needs of children; last year, three times more responsibility for childcare fell to women than men, and women make up more than 95 percent of the childcare workforce in the U.S.
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And women interact with urban infrastructure in different ways than men; they are 80 percent more likely to “trip-chain,” meaning they make multiple trips out of the house per day, often to several locations. Women are more worried about walking alone at night in dark areas. And public health experts say that women need twice as many public restrooms.
But cities, for the most part, are designed by and for men. When most city transit systems were designed, for example, urban planners considered first the needs of men who journeyed from home to work and back at mostly set times, usually by car.
“If you look out your window at a city that you live in anywhere around the world, it’s likely everything that you’re looking at and living in and moving through has been designed and managed by men,” says Katrina Johnston-Zimmerman, an adjunct professor of urban strategy at Drexel University and co-founder of the Women Led Cities Initiative.
Gender inequity that has been literally built into our cities for centuries is a stubborn problem—but that doesn’t mean there aren’t solutions.
Just look to Vienna, Austria, a global leader in making city-wide changes that accommodate the needs of women. Since the 1990s, they’ve worked to transform their parks, sidewalks and street lighting and other infrastructure—improvements that have benefited not only women and children, but city residents as a whole.
Vienna’s urban design changes have become a pinnacle of gender mainstreaming—the practice of accounting for men and women equally in government policy, legislation and resource allocation, including in urban planning and design. First adopted by the U.N. in 1995, the practice recognizes the fact that cities tended to be designed unequally, under the leadership of mostly male urban planners—even now, women make up only 31.5 percent of urban planners and only 17 percent of registered architects—and seeks to course-correct.
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For the past 10 years, Vienna has ranked as the number one most-livable city in Mercer’s quality of life index and they’ve become known as the “godmother of gender mainstreaming.” Their success has caused many cities, including Stockholm and Barcelona, to imitate their approach. Could Philly be next?
Innovation for equity
Many of Vienna’s efforts to make the city more accessible for women and children can be traced to the work of Eva Kail, the BCC reported in 2021. While working as a junior urban planner for the city in 1991, she organized a photography exhibit titled Who Owns the Public Space documenting the daily lives of eight women and girls living in the city. The photos followed the participants as they traveled along different routes through the city. Participants ranged in age and ability levels, including one woman who used a wheelchair. The images clearly showed that safety and ease of movement were a common priority.
The project was an immediate hit. Kail’s exhibition of the photographs drew 4,000 visitors and led to broader discussions about how the city was designed and who it served, the Guardian reports. Women discussed where in the city they felt unsafe and how they got around during their daily activities. As a result of the project, Vienna created its first Frauenburo, or women’s office, with the goal of making the city more equitable for women.
For the past 10 years, Vienna has ranked as the number one most-livable city in Mercer’s quality of life index and they’ve become known as the “godmother of gender mainstreaming.”
Through the Frauenburo, Kail has worked on more than 60 projects aimed at making Vienna more accessible for women. The city added streetlights in 26 areas that survey results revealed produced anxiety in women, according to the Guardian’s report. Sidewalks were widened to better accommodate strollers. Public benches were scattered throughout the city, so women could sit down with their children after running errands.Vienna even upgraded to traffic lights that sense a pedestrian’s movements, so that even jaywalkers can cross the street safely, Tomorrow City reported.
In 1996, the city did a year-long study on children’s use of public parks. They found that after kids turned nine, the number of girls using parks dropped dramatically while the number of boys held steady. To reverse the trend, Vienna redesigned two parks; they added foot paths to make parks more accessible and put up volleyball and badminton courts to appeal to the interests of girls, per a Bloomberg report from 2013. They also used landscaping to divide large open pockets into smaller spaces because the researchers noted that when boys and girls competed for open areas, the boys tended to win out. With many, smaller spaces within the larger park, boys and girls could use different areas without competing.
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One of Kail’s biggest successes was a 357-unit apartment complex called Frauen-Werk-Stadt (Women-Work-City). The building featured stroller storage areas on every floor, an open courtyard where children could play and onsite kindergartens, pharmacies and doctors offices. According to reporting from the Guardian, the project was so successful that other developments in Vienna have followed its lead.
Now, Kail’s efforts have been enshrined in city policy. Twice per year, individual departments have to report how their projects have benefited men and women equally and new housing developments have to meet gender sensitivity criteria—including plentiful lighting in courtyards and parking lots and barrier-free entrances and exits to buildings—in order to receive government subsidies.
Critics of gender mainstreaming say that it conflicts with feminist ideals of equity and upholds traditional gender roles—by equating childcare with women’s work, for example. But when done right, gender mainstreaming creates pragmatic solutions for current problems women still face. And, importantly, it isn’t just good for women—it’s good for everyone. Better infrastructure for pedestrians makes it safer for walkers and bikers of all genders. More benches and public restrooms allow all people—including elderly of every gender—to take the breaks they need, and to care for themselves. If city planners make neighborhoods safer for women and children to travel by themselves, they also become safer for everyone else.
A female future in Philly
Here in Philly, transit offers a good place to start. About 16 percent of Philadelphia households are underserved by public transit, what’s known as “transit deserts.” South Philly, Brewerytown, Strawberry Mansion and much of North Philly are some of the most underserved areas. These gaps disproportionately affect women—especially women of color—as commuting figures from a 2017 study show that 64 percent of Philly’s bus and subway riders are women.
5th Square is advocating for transit-only streets, a move that would prioritize buses and trolleys over cars. They’re also calling for a redesign of the bus network that includes more frequent service, shelters with benches, and more accessible sidewalks near stops. Their goal is to make the city’s transit more accessible for vulnerable users, including women, children and disabled people.
“When you think of [a city] more like a home, rather than thinking of it as an accumulation of buildings you look at it differently,” Johnston-Zimmerman says. “You’re thinking about giving everybody the opportunity to thrive.”
“I think a large part of it is going to be getting the administration, the city council, the planning commission, and SEPTA to all really agree that this is a problem … and to actually commit to making these changes in ways that aren’t just hiring a consultant to figure it out, but actually reaching out to people in a meaningful way to ask them, hey, what is it about this space that makes you feel uncomfortable?” Boggan says.
SEPTA is, in fact, in the process of rethinking the city’s transit system, including what it’s calling a Bus Revolution that started with rider outreach and a deep look at bus routes and schedules. The goal, according to the agency, is to align services with changing needs; simplify routes; and increase efficiency. The agency is also in the process of reimagining Regional Rail. How much of this restructuring will be women-focused is yet to be seen. (So far, the biggest change has been in branding: Now, the subway is called “Metro,” which doesn’t fundamentally change anything.)
Now is the ideal time to launch a women-designed city effort: For the past few years, women have outnumbered men in the city—by about 90,000 in 2019. Under Mayor Kenney, the City now has an Office of Children and Families, tasked with overseeing city services that cater to the needs of the youngest Philadelphians and their caretakers. SEPTA could get up to $540 million as a result of the recent infrastructure bill, and the city could get even more funds to reconnect neighborhoods, like Chinatown, that have been split by highways, in an effort to foster community. And with a high number of female mayoral candidates, it’s likely a woman could be leading the city in 2023—which could make a focus on gender mainstreaming more likely.
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Johnston-Zimmerman thinks that Philly’s scrappy identity could be an asset when it comes to advocating for more equitable urban planning. She points to advocacy from ordinary citizens that has led to shifts like SEPTA’s new policy of allowing children under 12 to ride free, and the tendency of people to clear their trash cans off the sidewalk and put flower planters in front of their houses as small ways citizens try to improve their neighborhoods. When we’re not shrugging our shoulders at the city’s many problems, we can actually create positive change.
And she thinks it’s critical that we reimagine our city, focusing on creating what she calls “communities of care.” That may look something like Vienna’s Frauen-Werk-Stadt, where people can live, work, take care of their families and look out for their neighbors.
“When you think of [a city] more like a home, rather than thinking of it as an accumulation of buildings you look at it differently,” Johnston-Zimmerman says. “You’re thinking about giving everybody the opportunity to thrive.”
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Photo courtesy of Visit Philadelphia