India stands at a defining moment in its urban journey, its cities expanding at a pace and scale unmatched in the nation’s history, skylines redrawn almost overnight, and infrastructure struggling to keep pace with the human tide. Yet, amidst this headlong transformation, a glaring omission persists. Most government departments, as well as many of our leading urban policy and research institutions, remain stubbornly inattentive to the vital intersections of gender, care, and the built environment. While it is increasingly recognised that men, women, and gender minorities inhabit and navigate cities in different ways, these lived realities remain largely invisible within dominant urban planning and policy frameworks.

 

Shaped by modernist traditions that privilege the notion of a ‘universal citizen,’ much of urban design and urban planning continues to operate on the false assumption of gender neutrality. The spatial discrimination, being mostly rendered invisible, is generally ignored as a non-issue. Although there is an absence of a formal mechanism within the urban local bodies to address this, there are efforts from NGOs, collectives and private organisations towards gender inclusion in the city and its spaces. These entities work on various aspects of urbanity (mobility, governance, housing, water supply, sanitation, technology, education, planning and design, etc) and use multiple forms of studies (research, design, mapping, white papers, etc), to bring out the gendered relations and spaces in the built environment, and how they can be addressed. Their collective knowledge and insights can contribute towards knowledge application, spatial design and policy development, thereby shaping urban futures that are vibrant, inclusive, safe, joyful and productive.

 

Drawing on emerging global and Indian discourses on a feminist and care-centred urbanism, the purpose of the roundtable is to bring together people who look at the production and consumption of the built environment from the analytical construct of gender. It seeks to bring together a diverse and committed community from the disciplines of gender studies, architecture, and planning, including practitioners, think tanks, NGOs, academics, activists and change makers to rethink the built environment including public spaces through feminist, intersectional, and care-centred perspectives.  

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