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Engineering Cities: Gender Walkshops

By ucqnfad, on 30 August 2018

International Women in Engineering Day exists to celebrate women who contribute so much to the profession, but who currently make up only 9% of the UK workforce.

The aim of the day is to explore the ways in which women are excluded from the profession and to continue to develop and lobby for increasing action to create a more inclusive industry. In light of this mission, people will be organising events around the world this week to discuss important issues such as the gender pay gap, the ever-present need for female role models and outreach activities, the contentious matter of quotas and the practical actions employers can take to ensure women are able to stay in work after they have started a family.

At the City Leadership Lab, however, we decided to do something slightly different. We wanted to focus on how the cities we live in – built in large part by engineers – are themselves gendered. We wanted to uncover the material results of a male over-representation in design and particularly how it is shaping our everyday lives, and we wanted to reveal the hidden histories of women’s activism in the city.

Tasked with this brief, Grace Gelder (photographer) and Tom Berry (illustrator) led us in gender-themed walking tours of Bloomsbury, helping us to look in new ways at the buildings and infrastructure in which we play out our lives. In Grace’s photography tour the group isolated details in the landscape to support us in peeling back the layers of gendered form and function. We took Virginia Woolf’s advice to trespass (she lived in Bloomsbury), we looked at how public and private spaces carve up the city and we explored the ominous ways in which we can be hidden in the city.

Tom armed us with clipboards, black paper and white pens to help us answer the question: do buildings have a gender, and how have they been dressed by the people who designed and built them? In this tour, we examined this question by looking at the facades and decorative elements of notable buildings in Bloomsbury. Through drawing and via a series of short readings, we addressed gender in the built environment to discover how we could understand more about these buildings and the society in which they were built.

Thanks to these wonderful facilitators and our willing and energetic participants, these walkshops proved to be an insightful, inspiring and motivating evening. As Tiffany Lam, who attended Tom’s walkshop, reflects:

“I appreciated how the illustration walk enabled opportunities to deliberately pause and reflect at different parts of the neighbourhood. Infrastructure typically focuses on movement; transport infrastructure, in particular, primarily facilitates rapid and efficient movement. Whether we are talking about HS2, Crossrail, the Heathrow expansion, or simply cycle lanes in London, the priority is to get from Point A to Point B quickly. However, our ability to move is contingent upon our ability to stop as well, and often that point may get lost in our day-to-day lives as well as in various urban practices and processes. The experience of stopping and going on the small neighbourhood scale made me reflect on how infrastructure facilitates (or fails to facilitate) mobility and stillness on more macro-levels, like the borough, the city, the country, etc.”

Thank you to Mark Johnson, who organised the event, and The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology for hosting our reception and panel discussion.

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