Sweden is committed to building a society in which girls and boys, women and men have the same power to shape society and their own lives and live their lives to their full potential. The NLA session “Gendered Landscapes under the Microscope” explored how the UK and Sweden are working with gender equality on a strategic and practical level. 

We in Sweden have been radically engaged in the issue of gender equity since the 1950’s and we see the need to continue to develop our understanding and our methods of working with this issue, while remembering our urban design heritage. 

A line of post-war thinking in the development of spatial planning was defined as the ‘Stockholm school of planning’. This was a movement that focused on developing a strong welfare state with the family at its heart. The approach has guided much of Sweden’s development until the beginning of the new millennium. Since the millennium, as in other cities of the world, the focus has been to a greater extent on the provision of numbers and economic value. 

At the same time, during recent years, our societies have been undergoing rapid transformations that have meant the need for a new focus on how we achieve sustainable and inclusive public realm and build liveable cities, with minimum impact on the environment. Maybe the currency should change to achieve this. The traditional role of the architect has needed to shift and to include other disciplines, such as social anthropologists, data specialists and cultural agents. New ways of working are now more process-based and socially engaged. This diversification, combined with research programmes and continual knowledge sharing, has been needed to help develop inclusive urban design which reflects current values. 

One outcome of this need has been the process of challenging the standard outcomes through ‘Norm Creative Design’. This can be defined as design approaches that include critical thinking of current use and users, with special emphasis on challenging current norms. Our research programme, Flickrum – Places for Girls https://whitearkitekter.com/project/places-for-girls/ , is an example of a norm creative approach, designed to focus on a specific social group that is often left out of traditional urban planning methodology. The outset was an art project; a piece of theatre featuring two teenage girls who are simultaneously constricted and set free by their urban environment, and led to open a dialogue with politicians, planners and other stakeholders on public places from girls’ perspective. 

We are not alone in the understanding that there is a greater and greater need to better understand our societies in a commercially driven built environment. The need to work both collectively and creatively has been recently highlighted in the New European Bauhaus initiative, calling for applications to generate transnational research and innovation projects to support building for urban transformation. 

Our goal is to help achieve an open minded and collaborative approach to the design of cities. A process that can help provide achieve a secure and inviting urban realm for women, teenagers and girls alike.