INTRODUCTION

It is “the tendency of every age to read the future as a fancier version of the present” (Schutz 1971).

Predicting Futures | Similar to the vertical living phenomenon of Le Corbusier (Graham, 1965), ensuring practicality and fluidity, was imperative to the planning philosophy of Robert Moses in in New York. However, Robert Moses was critiqued for his ‘birds-eye view’ in the 1980s when he was challenged by Jane Jacobs. Jacobs was an advocate for bottom-up initiatives, she watched and experienced local life to investigate and understand the intricate workings and different uses of city spaces. Planners, like Le Corbusier, are not the only ones attempting to predict and shape the future. This attempt to design imagery of a possible future can be in the Science Fiction genre (Sci-Fi) this attempt to design imagery of a possible future. Only recently has research shown that Sci-Fi visualisations and futuristic imagery in the media are sources of visualising and informing expectations (Akkawi, 2018). Since the beginning of the 20th century, Sci-Fi and futuristic imagery has built on ideas of “imaginative paradigms” (Annas, 1978), an attempt to predict futures or alternative presents. Sci-Fi has previously been a genre dominated by the work of men, however lately women have begun to engage with writing science fiction and are beginning to depict and illustrate a more feminine perspective of the future (Annas, 1978).

The prominence of Le Corbusier and Robert Moses in planning and the male-dominated production of sci-fi and arguably imagery suggests a representation of male futures, potentially influenced by patriarchy, notably ‘patriarchal futures’. Now, however, women are becoming more connected and involved with the future and challenging the imagery and expectations historically portrayed by males in both science fiction and past planning practice.

Past Futures | The past can continue to be used to guide the present and help to inform the future. A striking illustration of ‘patriarchy v feminism’ is the conflict of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. Using Jacobs’ actions in New York throughout this thesis will offer a guideline to understanding the importance of planning while taking into account each and every member of a community, and specifically that of the feminine population. Throughout the last 50 years feminism has fought to make cities a better place for everyone. For feminists working in the planning of future cities, such as Matrix; a women’s group combatting the “manmade environment” (Matrix, 1984), it is important that societal visions of the future are sculpted using a “gender lens” to incorporate and consider women in the urban setting. Arguably, it has been considered that planning practices, like those of Robert Moses, have been implemented by and designed for the “needs of a white, working-class male with little attention given to the other members of our community” (Matrix, 1984). Patriarchy is understood as male control and power through prominent roles of leadership (Engender, 2019), it also refers to social privilege and moral authority (Jarvis, et al., 2009). Patriarchy is a social system and is arguably still influencing the contemporary world (Jacobs, 1961, p. 29). In the continuous application of paternalistic ideas to the construction of the urban has caused the less dominant groups of society to be forgotten or socially excluded (Rose, 2019). Many women find themselves living in a space that is not suitable to offer them “the basic spaces to act as a mother … or the safety to thrive as a young woman” (Matrix, 1984) as a result of patriarchy. Throughout the last century, however, the effort to refuse patriarchal thinking and to create spaces that are gender neutral has gained attention. In 2010, the conference for Building Inclusive Cities, held in New Delhi, highlighted the “need to work towards more equitable access to the opportunities cities can offer, regardless of age, gender, … or any other factor, for all city dwellers” (WICI & Jagori, 2010). Arguably, in some cases city planning and governance is re-adjusting to a gendered approach to design an environment to prevent women’s “invisibility” and create a cityscape without gender polarisation.

Figure 2: Do we have any women here?

“Many of us are familiar with visualisations of future cities from mainstream media, popular culture… we are all able to read such images, even if we may have different interpretations of them” (Dunn, et al., 2014, p. 15). The influence of imagery on young females arguably threatens their individual thoughts, aspirations and expectations, specifically of the future. At present, future images are arguably being forecasted in alliance with the ideas of the white-male. Therefore, this research aims to bring together the movement of gender conscious planning by realising female expectations and the overshadowing of these feminine reflections in the ignorant representations of future city design through three visualisations.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Figure 3: Le Corbusier, Radiant City (Ville Radieuse), 1924

The intention of the following literature review is to acknowledge significant thinkers along two key branches of analysis: firstly, collecting literature on female navigation of the urban spaces arguably designed for and by men; and secondly to explore expectations for the future and current visualisations that project future urban designs.

In order to reflect upon the impact of previous planning designs with typically male-dominated visions, this review will explore three key themes explored throughout the feminist literature: the birds-eye view concept (Jacobs, 1961); the public v private stereotypes (Terlinder, 2003); and the gender data gap (Perez, 2019). Subsequently, the evaluation will offer an insight into the theory of individual horizons (Schutz, 1971) presented by Alfred Schutz. Then Cathy O’Neil will provide a brief analysis of the sexist algorithms from which technology is developed. Research by Gillian Rose will then aid in determining the influences of visual imagery on an increasingly ‘hyper-visual’ society (Rose, 2014).

Through understanding both of the key branches of analysis, it becomes apparent that the gap in research occurs in the connection between the literature on traditional patriarchal thinking creating exclusions for women in city planning and the research into the impacts of imposing visual imagery, offering ideas of future urban landscapes, based on societal expectations.

Bird’s Eye Vision

The design and planning of city landscapes has continually been reimagined and reconstructed by urban planners. Notably city planning has been influenced by Ebenezer Howards “Garden Cities of To-Morrow” (Badger, 2012), Le Corbusier’s attempt to combat overcrowding through a vertical style of living, known as “Towers in the Park” (Badger, 2012) and Robert Moses’ vision to design New York City around the increasing reliance on automobiles. However, each of these initiatives has been collectively criticised for having a “gap in perspective” (Perez, 2019, p. 32) due to their top down approach.

To explore this top-down approach and ‘birds-eye view’, the struggle between the feminist, Jane Jacobs and the “white-male town planner” (Jacobs, 1961, p. 30) Robert Moses, is illustrated in Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities (hereafter The Death and Life). Robert Moses’, New York City’s Planning Commissioner, was described as a “utopian modernist architect” (Dunn, et al., 2014, p. 13). He fought against what he viewed as ‘dystopian chaos’ (NYC Department of Records and Information Services, n.d.) and favoured the efficient movement of automobiles over that of human life (Jacobs, 1961, p. 242). Jane Jacobs, a local resident at the time, was greatly critical of Moses’ birds-eye vision, believing Moses to possess a typically male perspective and “essentially paternalistic, if not authoritarian” (Jacobs, 1961, p. 29) outlook. She says, “the trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so” (Jacobs, 1961, p. 270). Jacobs’s struggle against the patriarchal actions of Moses, was a ‘bottom-up approach’, which she recognised as the importance of community both for everyday life but also as a key informant for planning practise. The Death and Life recognises the different users and uses of space, and she notes that planners with a ‘birds-eye view’ plan “without knowing what sort of innate, functioning order it has” (Jacobs, 1961, p. 24).

The phrase “eyes on the street” (Jacobs, 1961, p. 45) was used by Jacobs to describe safety on the street level, with her research especially accounting for the safety of women. The concept, she said, was that a “busy street is far safer than one that is deserted” (Jacobs, 1961, p. 44). ‘Eyes on

the street’ was a direct response to Moses’ attempt to systematise streets and create zones, separating residential areas, workplaces and services and thus disconnecting people and activity. The result of ‘stable, symmetrical and orderly spaces… attributes of a well-kept, dignified cemetery’ (Jacobs, 1958) creates a landscape deemed threatening to mothers and children. Like Jacobs, Edward Glaeser, author of the Triumph of the City argues “[cities] are proximity, density, closeness. They enable us to work and play together, and their success depends on the demand for physical connection” (Glaeser, 2011). Subsequently, a key theme to Jacobs’s work was “mixed use spaces” to ensure that streets were busy at all times of day, offering connection between business, friends and family and interaction between different neighbourhoods. ‘Eyes on the street’ was a summary of safety, connection and protection proving that a successful neighbourhood should be lively and busy.

The “Progressive Zoners” (Jacobs, 1961, p. 33) have always sought to organise functions. Howard’s moving of residences into suburbs, Le Corbusier’s effort to organise vertically and Moses’s attempt to create zones in the city, are described by Jacobs as “a great visible ego”, no matter how ineffective the design (Jacobs, 1961, p. 33). Jacobs’s turmoil with Moses’s paternalistic vision came to a head when the proposal to construct a highway through Washington Square Park led Jacobs to bring women from the local community together to protest. She was able to demonstrate the intricacy (Jacobs, 1961, p. 112) and significance of the park for women and how they relied on public space in their neighbourhood differently to men. Jacobs’s critical analysis of the ‘birds-eye view’ is based upon the naivety of white male planners, and their lack of awareness for the reality of city life, discounting the key elements that make cities work for women.

It’s a way of not thinking

Jacobs’s work observes the lack of consideration of male planners as the source creating unsuccessful design for cities spaces. The top-down approach of patriarchy is argued by Caroline Perez, “as not generally malicious... it is simply a way of thinking that has been around for millennia and is … not thinking.” (Perez, 2019, p. xi). Additional sources have argued that patriarchal thought is programmed thinking

Figure 4: Flashback to the 50s and the Heroic Mums Protest

experienced not only by males but also females (Terlinder, 2003, p. 10), because “the chronicles of the past have left little space for women” (Perez, 2019). Simone de Beauvoir author of The Second Sex, writes “representation of the world … is the work of men … from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.” (Perez, 2019, p. xi). Perez, de Beauvoir and Jacobs all recognise engrained patriarchal thinking as a controlling element in the imagination of urban space design.

Ull Terlinder author of City and Gender, builds on patriarchal control by linking the unconscious thinking (Perez, 2019) to the deep-rooted roles of ‘public’ and ‘private’ (Terlinder, 2003, p. 41). Terlinder documents the stereotype of the “private women” and the “public man” and its filtration into the organisation of society. Her study explores how, historically, the normative images of a male dominated space are so common in societal thinking that it was considered to be the case that women “couldn’t participate in city life without the accompaniment or permission of a man” (Terlinder 2003 p.41).

Figure 5: Simone de Beauvoir Figure 6: Jane Jacobs

Figure 7: Robert Moses Figure 8: Le Corbusier

Despite the force of feminism, the inequalities between men and women continue; “men are the default and women are a niche aberration” (Perez, 2019, p. 241). Perez uses transport in the city as an example to highlight women suffering from a ‘male bias’ (Perez, 2019, p. 32), as their lifestyle requirements differ from the lifestyles of the male designers. As a result, “trip chaining; a travel pattern of several small interconnected trips” (Perez, 2019, p. 30) commonly travelled by women serving as carers, mothers or house-workers, are forgotten. The transport networks do not cater sufficiently and instead are focused to the commuter routes. Additionally, Perez reflected that pedestrian streets are “considered not relevant for infrastructure policymaking” (Perez, 2019, p. 34); consequently these routeways are marginalised and forgotten, women often end up walking further (Perez, 2019). Terlinder found that it wasn’t until well into the 20th century that women became increasingly involved in society that some of these “barriers to urban life” (Terlinder 2003 p.55) began to be removed, but still women continue to challenge “the not thinking” (Perez, 2019, p. xi).

Figure 9: Invisible Women

Gender Data Gap

The cause of inadvertent exclusion in planning decisions is described by Perez as the “gender data gap” (Perez, 2019, p. xiii). Invisible Women, published in 2019 by Perez, focuses on this gap, the idea “of unthinking that conceives of humanity as almost exclusively male”. The concept, also referred to as a “gap in perspective” (Perez, 2019, p. 32) can be most clearly demonstrated by the underrepresentation of female positions in authority. For example, only 1/3 of local councillors in the UK are female (Engendered, 2019), contributing to the deficit in female consideration. Perez criticises the male domination in governments as having “‘naïve realism’ and ‘projection bias’ … people assume[ing] that their own way of thinking or doing things is typical” (Perez, 2019, p. 270). Blindness to the female perspective in planning “limits women’s liberty” (Perez, 2019, p. 313). Perez notes that data collection on women is overlooked because “women’s travel patterns are too messy, their work schedules aberrant … women are abnormal, atypical” (Perez, 2019, p. 314). The lack of research into women’s lives as they become overlooked by male ‘projection bias’ is the cause of the ‘gender data gap’, it is acknowledged by Jane Jacobs, and Engendered, that the benefit of female representation is that “women simply don’t forget that women exist as men often seem to” (Perez, 2019, p. 315).

Biased Technology

There is increasing amounts of literature by Cathy O’Neil, Andrew Feenberg and others, compiling the argument that although the most visible impact of exclusion is created by the contemporary city design, it is rather the cause of biased technology, which is the foundation of future city designs as we progress towards smart cities. Cathy O’Neil presented an argument in her 2016 book Weapons of Math Destruction that the algorithms building data “separates people by sex, race, age and reinforces discrimination” (O’Neil, 2016). Perez also writes of male-biased technology in her analysis of the ‘gender data gap’. Perez describes the inequality as a “one-size-fitsmen” approach (Perez, 2019, p. 157) , she explains that the size of an iPhone is measured against the “reference man” (Perez, 2019, p. 158) and that car voice command systems listen to male tones more effectively then female (Perez, 2019, p. 162).

Future Horizons

Cities have long been the subject of imaginative projections and aspirations for better futures (Dunn, et al., 2014, p. 13). According to Alfred Schutz, a philosopher and social phenomenologist, “(it is) the tendency of every age to read the future as a fancier version of the present” (Schutz 1971). Planners have continually redesigned cities and endeavoured to create utopian solutions. This is the case with the “smart city” concept which is set to revolutionise the future, described as a “hyper-functionality” (Willis & Aurigi, 2017), an “anything, anytime, anywhere” (Graham & Marvin, 1996) style of life.

Pamela Annas argued in 1978 that the concept of technological advancements changing the way we live in cities has similarly been explored through the Sci-Fi genre (Annas, 1978). Since the beginning of the 20th century, science fiction and imagery has “built an imaginative paradigm” (Annas, 1978, p. 146), through literature and in cinema “entwining sci-fi and built environments … into a powerful interrelationship” (Dunn, et al., 2014, p. 30), evidence in films such as Ridley Scott’s (1982) Blade Runner, a representation of “high-rise, three-dimensional mobilised societies … in Los Angeles” (Dunn, et al., 2014, p. 30).

Six prominent sci-fi writers gathered their opinions on the relevance of sci-fi today, including Lauren Beukes, novelist and journalist, who thought that the genre “predicts the future of the world … [and] unpacks who we are in it” (Beukes, et al., 2017). They state that “science fiction can tell us… what kind of societies, what kind of lives, we are shaping” (Beukes, et al., 2017) and “science fiction stories … are a baseline for making sense of the world, and making it change,” that it is “the realism of our time” (Beukes, et al., 2017). This discussion concludes that sci-fi is “shape[ing] the rules of reality” (Beukes, et al., 2017) and presenting visions of possible futures.

Edmund Husserl, a philosopher in the late 19th and early 20th century, described predictions and estimates of the future as “horizons” (Husserl, 1973). Both Husserl and Alfred Schutz discussed internal and external factors, that contributed to one’s outlook on the future. Schutz considered our personal “lifeworld’s” (Schutz, 1971); our nationality, culture, religion, background and so on, as the primary mould

ing of our expectations. Husserl argued that individual expectations can be easily distorted or manipulated by “external horizons” (Husserl, 1973), alternative experiences and subsequent expectations.

The prevalence of sci-fi has led Yuval Noah Harari, author of 21 Lessons in the 21st Century, to be quoted as saying “science fiction [is] playing a key role in shaping public opinion” (Wired, 2018). Similarly a recent article warned “ it is worth considering the influence of visuals and cinema on our futures… and how cautious we should be in how we consume and create it” (Akkawi, 2018). Power of Visualisations Research has begun to link the predictions of future city scenarios shown through visualisations such as in sci-fi, and the influence it has on individual and societal expectations. For this research, the visual imagery depicting future imaginaries of cities is the argued “external horizon” (Husserl, 1973). A government report in 2014 noted that “the power of visualisations of future cities and their ability to capture and remain in our imagination through mainstream media cannot be overestimated” (Dunn, et al., 2014). Gillian Rose, a Cultural Geographer, has analysed promotional material produced by private planning corporations to promote future city design, and specifically the smart city model. Rose recognises through her research that most visual material is represented by the “young, able-bodied, white male” (Rose, 2019) and subsequently they show projections of city futures designed for males inadvertently excluding females. “The way we portray future visions of cities matters, and bad portray

als risk leaving people out” (Rose, 2019).

Figure 10: Online Platfroms

Additional studies by Rose and Alistair Willis have explored smart city imagery on social media platforms. They identify the contemporary importance of using imagery in the communication process with modern world (Rose & Willis, 2019), and particularly the young. However, they raise concerns of the increasing exposure to imagery through social media platforms as potentially acting to control wider societal expectations (Rose & Willis, 2019). This has been previously noted as ‘Print Capitalism’ by Benedict Anderson, a political scientist, who believed that unified understanding of language and imagery acts as control from the state (Anderson, 2006, p. 77).

The publication of imagery, typically by state-controlled or male-led corporations are, argued by Rose and Willis, influenced by the not thinking of the dominant white middle-class male, and the visuals are forecasted in alliance with these ideas (Rose & Willis, 2019). As previously mentioned, Perez claimed that the not thinking of males is “not generally malicious, or even deliberate” (Perez, 2019, p. xi), but that in contemporary imagery production it appears that the not thinking is transformed into ‘print capitalism’ and as a result, Rose argues that portrayals of future imaginaries through this imagery, and promotional material is “inadvertently creating social exclusion” (Rose, 2019).

R e s e a r c h Question

For this research, the importance of linking the literature of both branches of analysis, the forgotten females in cities and contemporary print capitalism, reveals the gap in research and subsequently informs the central question for this thesis.

Are female expectations of futures imposed on us by the patriarchal thinking of those who produce the imagery?

Figure 11: Metropolis