Race and Gender in Issues in Neighborhood and Residential Design

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• Objectives
• Historical Background
• Trends
• Case Studies

• Summary of Issue
• Case Studies

• General Solutions

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Books & Periodicals
• Web Addresses

Access to transportation, jobs, services, and facilities is deemed to be more difficult for women than it is for men. (Peake 417)

Jobs for women and men are often located in different parts of the city.
(Peake 417) 

Most women, regardless of race, are in sex-segregated occupations with low wages and lack of benefits.  There is still a significant wage gap in regards to gender and many women’s wages are less than adequate to support a family.   (Miranne 70)

Formal education is of critical importance in order to expand women’s income earning options as well as their social mobility. (Morris 145)

Women face sociocultural and economic barriers on the labor market that prevent them from being more flexible in their career choices. (Morris 145)

Women’s survival strategies and the spatial boundedness of their everyday lives are mutually constituted.  Many women, regardless of the absence or presence of a partner, must fulfill the multiple roles of employee, mother, and family provider. (Miranne 70)

Women’s responsibilities for the reproduction of labor power involve not only unpaid activities in the home and community but also maintaining client relations with agencies of collective consumption (such as health and welfare, and housing).  (Peake 417)

Despite women’s “double shift,” an inevitable consequence of women’s entry in waged labor is that the hours devoted to work in the house are falling. (Gottdiener, Pickvance 101)

For many African Americans, the nuclear family model tends to offer an inadequate child nurturing strategy.  Instead, extended families (relatives in close proximity) increase the chances for improving the family’s situation.  Thus, maintaining zoning ordinances that privilege the traditional nuclear family puts African American poor families at a great disadvantage.
(Miranne 179)

Methods of Gender Analysis

Three major methods of gender analysis: 
1. Conceptual and methodological addressing of boundaries (Miranne 2)
    In/Visibility of boundaries
    Meaning of “bounded” for women
    Causes of bounding: others, themselves, etc.?
    Purposes of bounding: exclusion, creation of alternative spaces, 
    intended parties, etc.?
    Basis for resisting, reconfiguring, or reconstruction of encountered 
    boundaries? 
    Methods for making socially constructed boundaries visible?
    What occurs at intersection of multiple boundaries?

2. Similarities and diversities of women’s lives as constructed by their social
    identities. (Miranne 2)
    Investigation of individual and collective experiences.
    How do women create their own histories and construct relations with each
    other, with men, and with the urban processes played out in space?
    How the intersection of gender and race affect women and limit/encourage
    action.

3. Challenging conventional notions of utility for urban space (Miranne 3)
    Looking at how women work the edges of boundaries to create new spaces
    for themselves. (Miranne 3)
    How women imagine space and how they actualize it in practice (Miranne 3)
    Results in a series of alternative visions of social and spatial boundaries
    within the urban environment. (Miranne 3)
    The extent to which visions are incorporated or stymied by governmental
    and other regulatory bodies as they establish boundaries. (Miranne 3)

Boundaries:

Complex structures that establish differences and commonalities between  individuals and groups. (Miranne 1)

Exhibit much flexibility; may be permeable and inclusive, or volatile and dynamic when socially constructed. (Miranne 1)

Reveal the interconnectedness between socially constructed gender relations and the visible and invisible boundaries that affect how women use urban space. (Miranne 1)

Enrich the imagery of cities and the actions that women take within them. (Miranne 1)

Historical Approach to Analyzing Gender Issues

The field of urban studies has long reflected a gender bias in both the construction of theory and the avoidance of research that directly addresses women’s lived experiences. (Miranne 1)

Early studies of women and the urban environment focused on the differences between women’s and men’s experiences and perceptions of the city, emphasizing in particular the spatial constraints experienced by women and the gender roles played within.

Later investigations centered on gender relations that stressed relations of inequality in which men and/or their institutions systematically use physical, political, and economic power to subordinate women.

Caroline Andrew and Beth Moore Milroy (1988) have looked specifically at the junction between physical urban structure and the socioeconomic practices that shape it and spring from it. (Miranne 5)

Study of gender relations through an examination of urban structures and processes, giving special attention to the historical contingency of both and the fact that both are constructed in line with dominant interests. (Miranne 5)

Women experience cities differently from men specifically because of the gender asymmetries that are embedded in distinct institutions and local institutional relationships. (Miranne 5)

Analysis of Gender Issues

Redemptive Places/Liminal Spaces:

Because Black women are seldom represented in the typical narrative of urban, planning, or architectural histories, their contributions to the major city-building era between the Civil War and World War I have all but disappeared.

To contribute to the urban fabric, they sponsored the creation of “redemptive places” in which Black men, women, and children found respite from harsh conditions in the industrializing city.

Many of the places they created no longer exist, which leads to the assumption that Black women did not influence the built environment

These places were redemptive in three ways:
1.      They grew out of religious activism.
2.      They tried to save the bodies and souls of Black migrants.
3.      They rescued Black, middle-class, women volunteers from purely
         domestic pursuits by giving them public identities.
 

They were also seldom designed specifically for the purpose devised by the volunteers, but instead were buildings and vacant lots adapted from previous uses

They constituted a “voluntary vernacular”, not completely private nor totally public.

Occupied a “liminal” or threshold space in which marginal populations (like single women looking for work) made the transition from rural roots to city soil.

1.       They existed only as long as there was demand for their services, then
          evolved into another type of institution or disappeared entirely.
2.       They provided services that fell between private charity and public
          welfare.

Members of the National Association of Colored Women and the Woman’s Convention had a vision of a better urban life for blacks, a vision they implemented by minimizing boundaries between the two organizations.

Black women’s voluntary work at the liminal edge between the public and private sectors helped shape a more humanitarian city for immigrants.

Their story is a reminder that middle-class Black women built bridges to the city for succeeding generations of their sisters.

Examples of Gender Issues

Effects off/on Public Housing:

It has been argued that changes in welfare provision may negatively impact the hosing stability of current welfare recipients and their families (Nichols and Gault 1999; Sard and Daskal 1998)

The convergence of race, class, and gender has resulted in patterns of residential segregation for economically marginal populations residing in public housing developments. (Miranne 126)

There is no place today within contemporary America, with the possible exception of prisons and certain hospitals, that stigmatizes the individual in as many debilitating ways as does public housing.

Poor women and their families have been bounded by the geographical neighborhoods, by the larger community, and by social service providers that cater to a specific clientele who are marked by their use of such services. (Miranne 128)

Spatial pressures include crowding, segregation, high crime rates, deterioration of public services and infrastructure, an overabundance of low-wage labor, and the mismatch in urban areas between the location of housing and employment opportunities. (Miranne 128)

Dynamics of Neighborhood Composition Related to Gender Issues

Understanding the dynamic of the metropolitan housing market is vital to understanding the housing and neighborhood choices and constraints single mothers face in securing housing and creating a home for their families (Miranne 183)

Precipitous drops in income following marital dissolution often force women into the rental market and thus to the central city, where rental housing is most available, but which is often older and more physically inadequate than that in the suburbs.

Post-divorce income changes leave other women “house poor” in suburbia-reluctant to move and struggling to retain the family home for the sake of residential stability, educational continuity for children, and existing support networks. (Miranne 184)

Physical inadequacy of housing often goes hand-in-hand with affordability, since one strategy a poor family can use to reduce housing costs is to live in substandard housing, where housing expenditures are sometimes lower. (Miranne 187)

Racially and economically segregated neighborhoods within cities establish boundaries that restrict choice of housing, schools, employment, child care, and services. (Miranne 188)

As the context for family life, the neighborhood exerts a strong influence on family outcomes. (Miranne 189)
 
 
 

While we face problems in dealing with racial aspects of urban planning and development, it is also important for us to understand the history and development of gender issues in neighborhood and residential design.