Urbanization: A double-edged sword for women

Urbanization is often associated with greater independence and opportunity for women – but also with high risks of violence and constraints on employment, mobility and leadership that reflect deep gender-based inequalities.

These issues – along with climate change, waste, water and other topics -- are explored in the April 2013 issue of the IIED journal Environment and Urbanization, published under the edition’s main theme of ‘Gender and Urban Change’. 

"Urbanization is among the defining features of current times, but it can mean very different things for men and women," says the journal's guest editor Cecilia Tacoli of the International Institute for Environment and Development.

"Unless policymakers, urban planners and development agencies understand these differences, urbanization will fail to meet its potential to improve the lives of all urban citizens."

The journal’s editorial highlights the key points on where and when urban women enjoy advantages over their rural counterparts; community savings schemes that build women’s leadership and support upgrading.

Others are how transport planning still fails to respond to women’s travel needs; and how urban contexts can reduce gender based violence, although often they can increase it.

The subjects of papers include an assessment of provision for water, sanitation and waste collection in two informal settlements in Kumasi and Kenya as well as a community-managed reconstruction in Old Fadama Accra, Ghana, after a fire.

The paper by Kwame Adubofour, Kwasi Obiri-Danso and Charles Quansah looks at provision for sanitation in two informal Muslim settlements in Kumasi, Ghana. This highlights the extremely low coverage for improved sanitation – toilet – facilities within households.

Most residents depend on a very inadequate number of poorly maintained public toilets or toilets shared by several households. Waste management practices in the two communities are also very poor.

The paper by Mensah Owusu describes how the residents of Accra’s largest informal settlement - Old Fadama – responded to a disastrous fire in May 2012. Although they received no official support for reconstruction, they organized to rebuild using permanent materials, which reduced fire risks. It also demonstrated to city authorities their capacities – which has long been one of their strategies to avoid eviction.

The papers presented in the journal explore the nature of gender-based disadvantage in urban contexts by focusing on specific angles that take into account the often neglected impact of urban form and urban labour markets; the disturbing pervasiveness of gender-based violence; the often ambivalent role of paid employment in promoting more equal gender relations; also the role of women in improving the infrastructure and services in low-income neighbourhoods and the constraints they face in securing recognition for this.

To a large extent these themes overlap and are addressed in all the papers, although with varying emphasis. 

A common thread underlined by all the authors is the critical importance of avoiding the assumption that women are a homogenous category.