Spheres + shortcomings

Public Space, and our built environment overall, has primarily been built by white men. Everything from rooms, to buildings, to parks, to the zoning guidelines from which they are created, have been designed from a cisgender, racist, and heteronormative perspective, framing white male cis-heterosexuality as the norm - marginalizing, alienating, and vilifying those who do not conform. (5)

In American culture, men have traditionally been associated with the exterior and granted the freedom to move openly in the public realm while women have been associated with the interior, the domestic, and the private, and those who exist outside the binary have not been considered. The urban built environment is one of hard edges, imposing structure, and monumental scale that agrandizes power, capital, and industry - all qualities culturally associated with the masculine. (6)

Seen as nurturing, cooperative, subjective, and emotional, the stereotypical woman is defined as domestic. However, even in such a space, she does not have authority. Language such as homemaker and housekeeper, master bedroom, head of the table, man of the house, man cave, and breadwinner reinforce ideas of male ownership. “A homemaker has no inviolable space of her own.” (7)

The spaces associated with women - the kitchen, the laundry room - are spaces of service. In this way, “the house [becomes] a spatial temporal metaphor for conventional role playing.” (8)

Queer people, who are not considered within the built environment, have carved out spaces for themselves in the margins between private and public. Places like nightclubs, coffee shops, pride parades, and gayborhoods have been created by queer people for queer people when others did not consider, nor believe in their right to spacepublic, private, or otherwise. These places provide community and resources. They celebrate freedom of expression and embrace marginalized identities. However, such places are diminishing in number and, even within them, white cis-normative prominence infringes on their inclusivity.

Both the glorification of the masculine in the public realm and the emphasis on femininity in the domestic realm, are dehumanizing in their veneration. The exclusion of transgender, gender non-conforming, nonbinary, or gender-queer people in the built environment denies their existence and forces them to define space for themselves. Such gendered architectural realms encourage the fragmentation of our built environment and reinforce assigned cultural roles. It segregates public and private and heteronormativity from queerness, preventing growth, unity, and knowledge exchange, further emphasizing the marginalizing nature of the heteronormative white male gaze.

5 Catterall, Pippa, and Azzouz Ammar. Rep. Queering Public Space: Exploring the Relationship Between Queer Communities and Public Spaces. London, UK: Arup, 2021.

6 Rendell, Jane, Barbara Penner, and Iain Bordan, eds. Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction. (London: Routledge, 2000).

7 Rendell, Jane, Barbara Penner, and Iain Bordan, eds. Gender Space Architecture, 2.

8 ibid