What would a non-sexist city look like? That was the question urban historian Dolores Hayden posed in 1980, during the transitional period between the second and third waves of feminism in the United States— a question that, more than forty years later, feels increasingly urgent across different parts of the world.
The core theory course ‘History and Theory in Architecture IX: 1990s Theories that Inspired Architecture’, offered by the Chair of History and Theory of Urban Design at the gta, ETH Zürich, included two sessions on feminisms to engage with debates that are often kept at the margins of official architectural and urban design curricula —still largely dependent on the lecturers’ commitment to engage with these inherently political issues, despite their critical importance for understanding the social dimensions of space.
The Swiss Architectural Leaky Pipeline
In Switzerland, as in many other countries, there is still progress to be made. At the Swiss Society of Engineers and Architects (SIA), for example, only 23,1% of registered architects are women. And the gendered division of paid and unpaid work continues to persist. Following the Federal Statistical Office (BFS), in Swiss households with children, 60.5% of women reduce their paid working hours – compared to only 14.4% of men – taking on a disproportionate share of unpaid domestic labour instead. Structural inequalities feed into the leaky pipeline in the architectural profession and its science, hitting women particularly hard and reinforcing gendered barriers among those responsible for designing our living spaces. The lack of intersectional data further exacerbates the issue. As a result, students often enter the profession unaware of these systemic inequalities, only to face impossible expectations, continuing cycles of disadvantage that are mostly invisible but have real consequences as the years pass by.
Who Owns Public Spaces?
Who decides which spaces matter, and which do not? Which designs favour specific activities over others? What role does space play in shaping the way our societies are organised? In 1994, British geographer Doreen Massey wrote that working on gender involves confronting the gendered nature of our ways of theorising, as well as the concepts with which we work. Viennese urban planners Eva Kail and Jutta Kleedorfer explored these issues in 1991 when they organised the exhibition Who Owns Public Spaces? Themes such as spaces of fear, infrastructures for everyday life, and mobility around the city remain, more than 30 years later, key to understanding the historical roots of present inequalities. In Zurich in the early 1990s, the feminist group Frauenlobby Städtebau conducted research on spaces of fear in the city, addressing issues related to sexual harassment in urban space. Many of these problems remain highly relevant today, as shown by the recent protests against gender-based violence in the Netherlands, reclaiming that “the night is ours.” History easily repeats itself when we fail to learn from it. This is why it is so important to learn from the 1990s feminist theories that inspired architecture and urban design – and beyond.
María Novas Ferradás is an architect and researcher specialised in exploring the intersections of social and political history and cultural studies with the built environment. She works as Senior Lecturer and Scientific Researcher at the Chair of History and Theory of Urban Design and as Academic Editor of the gta papers at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at ETH Zurich. Together with Cathelijne Nuijsink, she teaches the core theory course for master’s students ‘History and Theory in Architecture IX: 1990s Theories that Inspired Architecture’.
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