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Our cities are what we decide them to be. Our built urban environments have been shaped by human interests and ideas as much as everything else in our societies. Therefore they reflect the interests of those who have historically had their voices heard. Most of our cities are therefore designed for men who are working full time in paid employment. Unpaid care work - which is defined as direct care of, for example, children or elderly people as well as indirect care such as shopping and cooking - is in most places not calculated into the GDP and therefore often ignored in planning. 75% of this unpaid care work globally is carried out by women. It is their needs and lived experiences that have therefore been mostly ignored in urban planning.
The chosen framing is by no means meant to exclude gay parents, single fathers, non-binary folks, or other people who don’t identify as women but do a lot of unpaid care work. Further, I recognize that pregnancy is not exclusively experienced by women. Rather than enforcing a heteronormative narrative, this exploration is meant to center the lived experiences of all groups that have been ignored in urban planning, choosing the intersectional experience of women as parents as an example.
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