Designing Gender Sensitive Spaces for Consenting Cities

This edited collection investigates gender-sensitive spaces, design practices, and provocations that challenge the complex social and material structures that shape inequities of access and inclusion in the urban environment.

Designing Gender Sensitive Spaces for Consenting Cities: Practices and Provocations centres intersectional, gender-sensitive approaches to design in the urban environment as an integral strategy in combating spatial inequities. Through an investigation of design-led methods, project case studies, activist interventions, and processes of resistance and agency, this volume offers new thinking and practical approaches to demonstrate how design might shift towards safer and more inclusive cities for women, gender-diverse people, and LGBTIQ+ communities.

This book will appeal to practitioners, scholars, and students of urbanism, design, planning, architecture, and geography, as well as government and non-profit organisations that are interested in gender and equality and can influence the future narratives of cities.

Jess Berry is a design historian and an associate professor at Monash University. She is a senior researcher at the XYX Lab, where her research focuses on gendered spatial practices. Her research explores how gender identities are articulated and mediated through, and by, fashion, architecture, and interior design in cities.

Nicole Kalms is a professor in the Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture and founding director of the Monash University XYX Lab, which leads national and international research in gender and place. The innovation of Kalms’ research is the examination of digital, experiential, political, and material interventions collated to articulate both the shared and conflicted struggles of women and girls internationally. Her praxis repositions design as a strategic tool for challenging gender inequity. Her recent research has focused on public transport spaces for women and girls, gender-sensitive CPTED, and the use of participatory co-design to challenge gender-neutral urban policy.

Timothy Moore is a founder of Sibling Architecture, Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Monash University, and the Curator of Contemporary Design and Architecture at the National Gallery of Victoria. As a researcher within XYX Lab, he looks at the relationship between gender, sexual identity, equity, and architecture.

Gene Bawden is a communication designer and the head of Monash University’s Design Department. His research interrogates the design of Australian domestic spaces constructed as a prescriptive but highly charged representation of cultural belonging, social alignment, and gendered expectation. Gene combines his knowledge of gendered spatial practices and his communication design expertise within collaborative research projects.