Feminist City Planning – Praxagora

Quality of Life

Feminist architecture: making women feel safer and more at ease

The central area of Husby, a suburb of Stockholm with a predominantly immigrant population, has not seen much change during the forty years since its construction. The politicians of the Husby borough committee decided it was time for a makeover. Before the project was started, the public housing company Swedish Housing surveyed the Husby inhabitants’ experiences of their physical and social environment. It emerged that the women felt very unsafe in the centre, so that the area was frequented almost exclusively by men. This made local female politicians contact Swedish Housing to suggest that they apply feminist theory in architecture and city planning for redoing the centre. Scholars and architects were involved in the project named Praxagora after the Greek play about the female commander who seized power in Athens after the men had gone to war. The starting point for the project is that to reach a more gender-equal society one must adapt the physical environment.