by Equal Saree (translated by Julia Manacorda)
Summary:
Spaces "talk to us", transmit messages that we integrate unconsciously and that can (re)produce social inequalities. Childhood spaces, such as schoolyards or other urban recreational areas, play a relevant role in children's education. In those places, inequalities and exclusions that reinforce sexist stereotypes and gender hierarchies are normalized daily. Involving boys and girls in the analyzing processes and transforming the spaces where they usually interact is an opportunity to generate profound changes at the social and community levels.
Keywords: Childhood, urban space, coeducation, participation, gender
Introduction: Where are women and girls in urban spaces?
Historically, women and girls have been excluded, segregated, and violated in urban spaces, especially in those considered public, for being places of political and citizen participation, of power, of knowledge, and economic production. In some cases, our presence has been explicitly forbidden, such as the prohibition of women to access universities that have been in force for centuries. Since ancient times, we have uncovered limitations on access to urban spaces as a mechanism to ensure male control and the subordination of women (Campana, 2019).
Today in Western nations, these mechanisms have become more subtle but the androcentric and capitalist conception of the world continues to hinder our access to urban spaces due to at least two factors. On the one hand, issues related to the assigned gender role. The design and management of cities and territories prioritize activities linked to recognized economic production and activities that generate wealth for some elites, such as tourism or the agro-food industry. Activities related to care and community relations are not appropriately recognized. Also, those actions are not taken into consideration when designing built environments. That creates problems at different scales, from mobility systems that prioritize long distances for business at the cost of increasing mobility difficulties between municipalities or nearby regions to the construction of hostile and inaccessible environments that make travel and daily encounters near homes / daily life difficult. Although these issues should not have gender, the truth is that women are the main ones affected, since we continue to take on most of the reproductive, affective, and care work. On the other hand, sexist violence and especially some forms of urban violence, such as street harassment, affect us almost exclusively women and people with non-normative identities. These outbreaks of violence and the fear of it, in which we are socialized, restrict our mobility and access to spaces, limiting our right to the city (Beall, 1996; Ortiz, 2017). The design of urban locations has not taken into account the different perceptions and experiences to generate spaces that are inclusive from a gender perspective or other diversities.
These limitations are shown to be effective from childhood. Girls are more limited in moving around and staying in urban spaces than boys. For example, they are less allowed to go out to play alone or have more restricted schedules. In addition, they are not allowed to go to school alone in the same way as boys their age. The presence of girls in public spaces is smaller than that of boys. They also spend less time outdoors and use less space to play (Baylina et al., 2011; Karsten, 2011).
Rethinking schoolyards
All the issues mentioned above are territorialized in schoolyards, playgrounds par excellence during childhood.
The design of the playgrounds prioritizes masculinized activities, placing them in a central and visible position and providing these spaces with adequate play elements and furniture. Some of these activities, such as soccer, occupy more than 70% of the available common location. On the contrary, the design of the playgrounds makes the girls' needs and desires invisible since the activities they perform are not taken into consideration and are relegated to peripheral and poorly equipped spaces. Minimizing the relevance of these imbalances in the use of a common space reinforces sexist stereotypes and gender hierarchy from an early age, transmitting the idea that it is something normal and acceptable and becoming integrated into the learning of boys and girls within the hidden curriculum. (Saldaña, 2018).
Fortunately, in recent years, the problem of schoolyards has gained relevance, and the need to rethink them has become clear beyond feminist circles. The demand for urgent action has led to the production of several methodological resources, such as the guide El patio de la escuela en igualdad (The schoolyard in equality) (Saldaña et al., 2019), to rethink schoolyards from the perspective of coeducation. Based on this methodology, the Equal Saree team has accompanied different schools and institutes in their reflection and change processes, such as the Verge de la Salut school in Sant Feliu de Llobregat, the Sant Salvador de Cercs school, or the Empatitzem project in which six schools from Santa Coloma de Gramenet participated.
The first step is to become inequalities aware. Hence, know that change is needed. Therefore, we start working with the teachers to reflect on how the different spaces are used and occupied, and on the pedagogical function of the playground. Once the teaching staff believes in the project and makes it their own, we can involve the students. We start by analyzing the playground. It is important to detect the specific problems and needs of each case to propose solutions that are coherent with the surrounding environment and the community. We work from direct observation, perceptions, and the different experiences of students in the playground. Once the transformation objectives are defined, we start to co-design the proposals. We use distinct techniques adapted to the age of each group: drawing, collage, three-dimensional models. We experiment with the body and materials; we verify if ideas could be implemented. Through dialogue, we seek solutions for the common good, reaching a consensus in which the defined proposals represent all the people who participated in the process. In the institute's case, since they were teenagers, we were able to involve them as researchers. Based on some guidelines that we elaborated from Equal Saree they observed, debated, and elaborated design proposals in a more self-managed way.
From all these experiences, we can define common criteria that can serve as a guide to start thinking about how to transform courtyards into co-educational, sustainable, and healthy places. First, de-hierarchize the courtyards, distribute the available space more equitably among the different activities taking place and among the people who use them, and look for polycentric structures that avoid the monopolization of space and the encroachment of some activities over others. Secondly, diversify the playgrounds, providing them with a variety of characteristics and stimuli that promote the most diverse games of movement, creativity, and imagination, balance, and coordination, that enhance communication skills and cooperative rather than exclusively competitive games. Finally, renaturalize the courtyards, recover soft and permeable sidewalks, and introduced trees and plants. In this way, we will not only generate a pleasant environment and greater climatic comfort thanks to the creation of shadows and the effect of vegetation and permeable floors as temperature regulators, but we will also promote a less stereotyped game since in spaces with natural elements is where a more shared game between boys and girls is detected.
Living in Co-Educating Cities
As stated in the recent revision of the Charter of Educating Cities (2020), it is necessary to affirm the right to the educating city, or rather the coeducating city, as an extension of the right to education, since education transcends the school walls, permeating the entire daily environment.
Public spaces are essential as meeting points, playgrounds, and social, cultural, and political representation. As we saw in the case of the schoolyard, spaces speak to us, transmitting messages that we integrate unconsciously and that can reproduce social inequalities. Community participation and co-design processes are tools that allow us to reflect on our lifestyle and raise issues such as the coexistence of people with different realities or the management of care.
Children have been one of the groups generally forgotten when it comes to designing cities. Their experiences, perceptions, and needs have not been considered. However, putting children at the center of decisions benefits the rest of society and allows us to move towards more inclusive and resilient urban models. So how can we include children as active agents in the transformations of their surroundings? How can we make co-creation processes with children generate more coeducational spaces?
As an example, we present Fem dissabte! (1), a project that takes previously outlined ideas and puts them into practice in an urban regeneration experience. This project, which we developed in collaboration with the Education and Urban Planning departments of the City Council of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, began in 2016 for over three years, we worked together with boys and girls from the neighborhood to diagnose the needs and design the new square. During this period, we carried out a participatory diagnosis of the plaza and defined the guidelines for the remodeling. The initial activities were aimed at finding out how the configuration of the spaces affects children from the perspective of emotions, influencing individual and collective well-being.We worked with the neighborhood to collect the needs of caretakers and caregivers and define what activities and games the future plaza should house to satisfy the preferences of children of different ages. Also, one generated ideas bout how the plaza could facilitate intergenerational coexistence and respond to the plurality of choices and needs. Finally, the elements to compose the new design of the plaza were decided: the type of vegetation is most appropriate, the symbolic and identitary elements of the community that should be introduced, and what relationship the plaza should maintain with the adjacent streets, depending on their character and the intensity of vehicular traffic. In a second phase, we worked with the students of the Torre Balldovina school, neighboring the square, to develop a project that would take into account all the needs detected and the proposals collected.
One inaugurated the remodeled plaza in August 2019. The result is a permeable plaza open to the neighborhood, with a diversity of spaces and uses to meet the needs of different users, with comfortable furniture and with elements that value the process of co-creation with childhood. Its joyful and colorful essence, the steps that allow you to walk along with it according to the most common routes, the type of games chosen, the trees, and the materials... Each and every decision was made collectively, giving the square a unique character. Today, people of different ages use the square and we can observe how a wide variety of non-stereotypical games are played and shared between boys and girls.
Conclusions: Playing in Equality Today to Live Equally Tomorrow
The spatial dimension does not yet occupy a significant place when we are concerned about making visible and disarticulating gender inequalities, neither in education nor in other urban spaces. However, we have seen that spaces are fundamental in the transmission of social and cultural values and that they influence the uses, appropriations, and exclusions that are generated.
It is relevant to encourage the women's presence and people with non-binary identities in spaces of visibility and centrality, of participation and decision-making, and to ensure that they can access them under equal conditions from childhood, from the schoolyard, or other urban play spaces.
In this sense, involving children in the transformations of their daily environments can be an educational challenge and a way to achieve profound changes since we are stimulating them to reflect on the issues that directly affect them and the spaces they use in their daily lives.
Participatory processes strengthen relationships between people, promote teamwork, and value the common good above individual interests. In addition, the feminist perspective allows us to intersect the physical, social, and psychological aspects of space to make visible the structural character of inequalities and generate strategies for action that can prevent them and stop them from continuing to reproduce.
Footnotes:
(1)"Fem dissabte": Catalan expression used to designate the days of cleaning and general order in the houses that traditionally were on Saturdays.
References
Associació Internacional de Ciutats Educadores (2020). Carta de ciutats educadores, Barcelona. Accessed January 8, 2021 at: https://www.edcities.org/ca/carta-de-ciutats-educadores/
Baylina, Mireia, Anna Ortiz y María Prats (2011). «Children living in the city. Gendered experiences and desires in Spain and Mexico». Em Holt, Louise (ed.): Geographies of Children, Youth and Families. An international perspective. Oxford: Routledge, 153-166.
Beall, Jo (1996). «Participation in the City: Where Do Women Fit In?». Gender & Development, 4 (1), 9-16.
Campana, Alejandro (2019). Reflexiones sobre la necesidad de un urbanismo feminista. O cómo hacer frente a roles de género enraizados en el planeamiento. Master's Final Work, Universidade Autónoma de Barcelona, Department of Geography.
Karsten, Lia (2011). «Infancias diversas: redes sociales de los niños y las niñas en Ámsterdam». Documents d’Anàlisi Geogràfica, 57 (1), 31-45.
Ortiz, Sara (2017). «El lado nocturno de la vida cotidiana: un análisis feminista de la planificación urbana nocturna». Kultur, 4(7), 55-78.
Saldaña, Dafne (2018). «Reorganizar el patio de la escuela, un proceso colectivo para la transformación social». Habitat y sociedad, 11, 185-199.
Saldaña, Dafne, Julia Goula, Helena Cardona y Carla Amat (2019). El pati de l’escola en igualtat. Guia de diagnosi i d’intervenció amb perspectiva de gènere. Barcelona: Pol·len edicions.
Authors: Dafne Saldaña Blasco, Julia Goula Mejón, Helena Cardona Tamayo
Colectivo Equal Saree
Barcelona, España
Contact: hola@equalsaree.org
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