Five Reasons Cities Need Gender-Sensitive Urban Planning

Care work, safety, and everyday mobility shape how cities are used, yet they often remain overlooked in planning. Sina Nielsen explores why this gap matters and what a different approach could look like.

Urban planning is often framed as a technical task: the design of transport systems, the allocation of land use, and the provision of infrastructure. Yet these decisions are not neutral. They rely on implicit assumptions about how people live, move, and participate in urban life.

What planning makes visible tends to shape what is prioritised. Transport flows, land use patterns, and infrastructure networks are carefully measured and mapped. Other dimensions receive far less attention, even though they structure how cities are used every day. Care work, perceived safety, and the small, repeated movements that organise daily routines rarely appear as central concerns.

A gender lens does not simply add another category. It shifts the perspective. It asks what urban planning starts from, and whose realities are reflected in it.

 1. Mobility Beyond the Commuter Model

This becomes particularly visible in transport planning. Many systems still follow a model built around direct journeys between home and work.

Yet, everyday mobility rarely follows such a linear pattern. Many people, particularly women, combine childcare, shopping, work, and access to services in interconnected trips. This “mobility of care” does not fit easily into systems designed around efficiency along major corridors.

Vienna shows how planning can respond to these differences. Since the 1990s, gender-disaggregated data has revealed distinct mobility patterns, including a stronger reliance on walking, public transport, and short-distance trips. These insights have informed measures such as wider pavements, safer crossings, and better-connected neighbourhood services. Over time, this has shifted the focus from traffic flow towards accessibility in everyday life.

2. Safety as a Condition of Access

Mobility, however, is not only shaped by infrastructure. It also depends on whether people feel able to use the spaces available to them.

Experiences of harassment and insecurity influence how people move through the city. Many women and marginalised groups adjust routes, travel times, or transport choices in response. These adaptations rarely appear in planning data, yet they play a significant role in structuring urban access.

Safetipin, developed in India, makes these dynamics visible. By combining user-generated data with structured safety audits, it captures factors such as lighting, visibility, crowd density, and accessibility. The resulting maps and scores highlight where public space restricts access in practice and help identify concrete points of intervention.

In this way, safety becomes not only a social concern but a measurable and actionable dimension of urban planning.

3. Care as Urban Infrastructure

If mobility and safety shape how cities are used, care shapes how daily life is organised. Yet it remains largely absent from planning frameworks.

Globally, women carry most unpaid care work. Planning frameworks rarely recognise this, as they treat care as a private responsibility rather than a spatial concern. This has direct implications for how services are distributed and how time is organised across the city.

Bogotá’s Care Blocks programme (manzanas del cuidado) offers a different approach. It brings childcare, health services, legal support, and training together within neighbourhoods, which reduces travel distances and eases time constraints.

At the same time, it creates opportunities for caregivers to access education, employment support, and leisure while care services are provided. This addresses not only access to services, but also the distribution of time and opportunities. Care becomes part of urban infrastructure rather than an invisible background condition.

4. Urban Economies and Spatial Access

Access, however, is not limited to mobility and services. It also shapes how urban economies function. In many cities, particularly in the Global South, a significant share of economic activity takes place in informal settings, where women are strongly represented. Street vending, home-based work, and small-scale services depend on access to public space, proximity to customers, and basic infrastructure.

Urban planning directly shapes these conditions. Zoning regulations define where economic activities are permitted, while street design, redevelopment, and public space management influence access to high-footfall areas. Interventions such as street clearance or upgrading projects can therefore displace livelihoods when informal activities are not taken into account.

From this perspective, access to income is closely linked to how urban space is organised.

5. The Urban Gender Data Gap

Across these dimensions, a common issue emerges: what planning systems can see.

Urban planning relies on data, but what is measured determines what becomes visible. In many cities, gender-disaggregated data on mobility, safety, and access to services remains limited. As a result, differences in how urban systems are experienced often remain underrepresented.

Examples such as Vienna show how such data can inform more differentiated decisions. At the same time, tools like Safetipin demonstrate that data itself can be expanded to include lived experience and everyday perceptions.

It Is Time to Rethink the Starting Point of Urban Planning

Taken together, these examples point to a structural gap between system-oriented planning approaches and the realities of everyday urban life.

They show that many forms of urban inequality do not result from a lack of infrastructure, but from how cities are planned in the first place. When planning starts from simplified models of daily life, it produces systems that work well for some and less well for others.

A gender lens makes these mismatches visible. It highlights where planning assumptions fall short and where everyday practices are not reflected in urban systems.

Rethinking urban planning, then, is not a question of adding new priorities. It is a question of changing the starting point.