Who is the city for?

On a warm evening in Ahmedabad, around 30 architects, urban planners, students, researchers gathered for a workshop aimed at understanding who the city is for? While gender was the primary lens through which we aimed to understand the experience of the city, we intersected it with age, economic status, and disability. Sonal Shah, the Urban Catalysts gives a brief report

Each participant wore a persona, either a pregnant woman from a marginalized background, a male carer from a privileged background, an able-bodied male student going to a private university, a person identifying as a transwoman. They all started from a single line and began to take a step forward depending on whether the statements that were read out held true for them. The statements aimed to assess how safe they felt in moving around the city independently in the day and in the night, how affordable the public transport was for them, if they had experienced sexual harassment in public spaces.

 As different individuals began moving forward to claim their right to the city, it became apparent who was being left behind. The independent movement of an elderly woman with a motor impairment was most restricted in the city; an able-bodied man had the most access to the city. An interesting insight emerged when a participant – whose persona was that of an able-bodied male carpenter – mentioned that he could also experience sexual harassment in crowded buses.

After this exercise, we sat in a small, compact room and had a detailed discussion about this exercise, and used two project videos by The Urban Catalysts: safe and secure public transport in Delhi and enabling women’s access to electric two-wheelers– as a starting point. Each person spoke about his/her individual experience of living in Ahmedabad, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai. What emerged from this workshop is that we need to start understanding differential access and right to public spaces in the city – gender is a powerful lens, and must be intersected with other social identities.