Does contemporary urban planning meet the needs of women and underrepresented groups? The answer to this question, unfortunately, is often no. In their talks, Leslie Kern and Natalya Palit highlighted some of the ways in which cities make women and underrepresented identities invisible. Both speakers argued that to build gender-sensitive cities, urban planners should take into account the desires and needs of marginalised groups. They stressed the importance of adopting user-centred, bottom-up approaches to urban planning.

In my opinion, the marginalisation and exclusion of women and underrepresented identities are so deeply entrenched in architecture’s ways of working that we cannot rely on traditional methodologies. Instead, a fundamental rethinking of architecture from its theoretical foundations is necessary. A look back to the origins of architecture can offer us valuable insight into the ways in which architecture is complicit in the production, representation and enforcement of gender distinctions. It can also help us to gain insights into the ways in which these gender distinctions influence our society’s understanding of urban space.

The Western tradition of architectural writing began with the publication of a ten-volume treatise titled De Architectura (c. 30-15 B.C.), which was composed by the Roman military engineer and architect Vitruvius. The text discusses various topics related to architecture, including its origins and evolution. In the mid-fifteenth century, the Florentine sculptor-architect Filarete (1400-1469) revisited the question of architecture’s origins. While acknowledging Vitruvius’s origin myth as his predecessor, Filarete interweaves the invention of architecture with the biblical narrative of the Fall of Man as told in the Book of Genesis. According to Filarete, architecture was invented in the wake of Adam’s expulsion from Paradise. However, in Filarete’s origin myth, there is one striking omission: the figure of Eve. Eve is completely absent, both from text and image. This makes Adam the sole inventor of architecture. The text presents Adam’s body as the ideal model for architecture, attributing its supposedly exceptional beauty and harmonious proportions to God’s creation. Filarete’s origin myth thus enacts the conceptual displacement of woman from architecture.

In fifteenth-century architectural theory, woman has no place in architecture, and when she is finally mentioned, for example in the writings of the humanist author and architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), she is confined deep inside the house, where she is inaccessible to the outside world. Woman’s confinement within the house, according to Alberti, is due to her supposed ‘delicate’ character as well as her role as primary caretaker of her children. Men, on the other hand, are characterised as more ‘energetic’ and thus able to leave the home for extended periods. This has profound implications for our understanding of the urban realm. The city, as it is conceptualised by fifteenth-century architectural theorists, is not a space for women; it is not designed for them.

The notion that a woman’s place is in the home is prevalent in architecture and urban planning to this day, although often implicitly rather than explicitly. Neighbourhoods and cities are built around the concept of the woman as a stay-at-home parent, imposing a series of physical, social and economical constraints on women. As Kern and Palit noted in their talks, contemporary urban planning often still falls short of addressing the needs of working women and underrepresented groups. In my opinion, these problems can be addressed by unpicking the complex relationships between architecture and the gendered body through the lens of architecture’s origin myths. Once we become aware of the power relations and exclusionary frameworks within which architecture operates, we can begin to dislodge them.