Radical Feminist Urbanism: Unpacking and Re-imagining Post-Conflict Recovery and Planning

Who gets to rebuild cities after war? Sagal Abas Bafo argues that post-conflict recovery must centre women’s experiences and feminist Global South perspectives to create more equal cities.

In recent decades, we have witnessed how conflict, civil wars, and violence have devastated cities and neighbourhoods across the globe. Khartoum, in Sudan, Homs in Syria, and Gaza in Palestine, once full of urban life, now lie in ruins. Beyond the physical destruction, conflict fractures social fabric, collective identities, and inter-communal relationships that sustain urban life.

This raises an urgent question: when the war ends, who gets to re-imagine the city and take the lead in the recovery and reconstruction process?

This piece calls for a radical rethinking of post-conflict urban recovery from a feminist Global South perspective.

Urban Destruction, Gendered Consequences

Conflict is a gendered crisis. According to a UN Report in 2024, hundreds of millions of women and girls live in proximity to armed conflict, and nearly 90 per cent of all casualties are civilians, with women and girls making up the majority of them. (UNwomen, 2025)

They face forced displacement, loss of legal documentation, evictions and increased risks to their safety, such as sexual and gender-based violence, and trafficking.  The destruction of public infrastructure reduces mobility, restricts access to public safe spaces, and undermines access to health care, markets, and livelihoods.

In Sudan, the erosion of maternity services has forced over 2,000 pregnant women to flee their homes due to the fighting, travelling long distances on foot to access safety and urgent medical assistance, resulting in complications, miscarriage or death. (UNFPA Sudan Situation Report 2024–2025). In Gaza, the destruction of homes, health facilities, and markets has reshaped everyday survival, increased unpaid care burdens and limited women’s access to income.

Informal street markets are vital sources of income for many women in conflict-affected cities. Yet these livelihoods are often overlooked in post-conflict reconstruction planning. © Sagal Abas Bafo

Even after hostilities subside, there is truly no ‘post’ in the post-conflict cities. Women are overrepresented in informal displacement settlements lacking public safety measures such as streetlights, exposing them to an increased risk of gender-based violence. Economic breakdown disproportionately affects them, particularly those reliant on informal work and caregiving responsibilities, with limited access to loans and recovery grants.

Land ownership further illustrates structural inequality. In contexts such as Sudan, Iraq and the Democratic Republic of Congo, discriminatory inheritance practices and weakened legal systems deny women secure tenure, excluding them from long-term reconstruction and urban development. (Cities Alliance, 2024)

Urban destruction, therefore, is not gender-neutral. It reshapes access to safety, economy, and space along deeply unequal lines. It is not just the built environment that is the target, but also the institutions, policies, and civic engagement that would have allowed them to articulate their gendered needs and shape the recovery process.

Who Shapes Urban Recovery, Power and Reconstruction?

Post-conflict recovery is often implemented through top-down approaches led by INGOs, NGOs, the World Bank, the EU, and UN agencies, which exclude those most affected by the destruction of their cities.  Post-conflict urban reconstruction is not only technical. It is political. It determines whose experiences matter, whose accessibility and safety are prioritised, and whose vision shapes the future city.

Despite the complex intersectional and gendered impacts of urban conflict, women remain largely excluded from high-level decision-making reconstruction forums where budgets, spatial plans, governance, and laws are shaped. While rebuilding infrastructures, such as roads and ministry buildings, is prioritised as a critical step in the recovery phase, the approaches fail to truly take on board demographic realities and the everyday urban complexities or local visions for recovery.

In spite of commitments under the Women, Peace and Security agenda, gender remains marginal in post-conflict urban reconstruction. As of 2025, although more than 110 countries have adopted WPS National Action Plans, only around 55 per cent include explicit commitment to women’s participation, and only a few are backed by gender responsive budgets. Meanwhile, only 0.3- 0.4 per cent of bilateral aid to conflict-affected

Local markets are essential urban spaces for livelihoods and everyday life. Feminist urban approaches emphasise the importance of including these spaces in post-conflict recovery planning. ©Sagal Abas Bafo

contexts reaches women’s organisations, who are most likely to put forward gendered urban policy recommendations.  (UN, Women 2025)

In rapidly urbanising recovery settings, reconstruction financing for housing, land, transport and infrastructure often proceeds without system gender analysis, budgeting, or urban safety audits. As a result, cities risk being rebuilt in ways that reproduce, rather than transform, pre-existing spatial and gender inequalities. An example of this can be found in post-2001 reconstruction in Kabul, Afghanistan, where large-scale investment into the rebuilding of roads and housing development was designed without the consultation of women. As a result of this, women continued to experience barriers in accessing public space, in addition to the lack of safe public transportation and sanitation facilities in markets.

Studies would later show that despite the investment into the rebuilding of physical infrastructure, women’s mobility in Kabul remained highly constrained, showcasing the consequences of when gender-responsive planning is overlooked in post-conflict urban reconstruction. (UN-Habitat, 2019 Report)

Feminist Spatial Reimagination

“Marginality as a site of resistance. Enter that space. Let us meet there.” Bell hooks, Radical thinker, writer

As bell hooks suggests, marginality can be transformed into a site of radical possibility and resistance, which allows foran  oppositional perspective. A radical Global South feminist approach to post conflict recovery centres this possibility by confronting the past conditions of inequality and re-imagining urban futures grounded in socio-spatial justice. Acknowledging histories of exclusion is not optional; it is the starting point to truly create a gender equitable cities.

To build gender equitable post-conflict cities, we must move away from traditional top-down mapping to a radical feminist gender spatial approaches that centre the lived experiences of women and marginalised groups. Rather than treating space as neutral, this approach invites women and girls urban dwellers, inhabitants, activists, women-led organisations, community leaders and other representatives from marginalised groups to map how accessibility, safety, exclusion, and human rights are shaped by spatial inequalities, gender, historical power structures and intersecting factors including class, disabilities, and religion.

Using indigenous and decolonial methodologies such as a body or territory mapping, participants reflect on memory, feeling and of movement to determine safe times, and routes, spaces for relaxation, economic livelihood, and belonging in post-conflict urban dynamics, especially where mobility and security are deeply restricted, such mapping become more than an exercise: It is a form of resistance and agency. Through this approach, they are able to forge new collective ways to live in urban cities and navigate public spaces.

From Rebuilding to Reclaiming

Reclaiming the city means more than rebuilding infrastructure. It requires gendering reconstruction priorities, ensuring that the processes are shaped by the lived realities of women and marginalised groups.  Women-led civil society organisations, activists, women leaders, displaced women, urbanists, and Global South practitioners must participate as equal contributors alongside urban planners and policymakers.

Their inclusive participation goes beyond the tick box exercise. Rather, it is through their transformative representation that allows for the unique opportunity in turning urban destruction into a pathway to building back better cities, by reversing historic gender bias that has been entrenched within urban planners, and then integrating the diverse gendered needs and experiences that will allow us to create an enriching city that is safe and fair for everyone.

We also need to re-imagine how we can use technology that captures informal economies, care work, safety patterns, and everyday mobility. Only then can reconstruction move beyond rebuilding structures, and towards a feminist social urbanist transformation – centring local experiences, and knowledge to redefine what a future city can look like.