If we really want to start designing transport systems that serve women as well as men, it’s no good designing transport infrastructure in isolation, cautions Sánchez de Madariaga, because women’s mobility is also an issue of overarching planning policy: specifically, the creation of ‘mixed use’ areas. And mixed-use areas fly in the face of traditional planning norms that, in many countries, legally divide cities into commercial, residential and industrial single-use areas, a practice that is called zoning.
Zoning dates back to antiquity (what was allowed on either side of the city walls, for example), but it wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that we started to see the kind of explicit division of what could be built where that legally separated where you live from where you might work. And, with its oversimplified categories, this kind of zoning has woven a male bias into the fabric of cities around the world.
Zoning laws are based on, and prioritise the needs of, a bread-winning heterosexual married man who goes off to work in the morning, and comes home to the suburbs to relax at night. This is, explains Sánchez de Madariaga, ‘the personal reality of most decision-makers in the field’, and the idea that the home is mostly a place for leisure ‘continues to underpin planning practices throughout the world.’41
But if for these decision-makers the home is ‘a respite from paid labour’ and ‘a place for leisure’, that is far from its role in most women’s lives. Globally women do three times the amount of unpaid care work men do;42 according to the IMF, this can be further subdivided into twice as much childcare and four times as much housework.43 In Katebe, a town in central Uganda, the World Bank found that after spending nearly fifteen hours on a combination of housework, childcare, digging, preparing food, collecting fuel and water, women were unsurprisingly left with only around thirty minutes of leisure time per day.44 By contrast, men, who spent an hour less than women per day digging, negligible amounts of time on housework and childcare, and no time at all on collecting fuel and water, managed to find about four hours per day to spend on leisure. The home may have been a place of leisure for him – but for her? Not so much.
In any case, in most families both parents work, and with women in heterosexual couples being the most likely to have primary caring responsibilities over children and elderly relatives, the legal separation of the home from formal workplaces can make life incredibly difficult. Those who have to accompany children and sick relatives around the peripheries of an urban area poorly served by public transport infrastructure are forgotten. The truth is that most zoning ordinances do not reflect women’s lives (or even many men’s lives).
The impact of the kind of lazy unthinking that positions the home as a place of leisure can be severe. In 2009, Brazil launched a public housing scheme called Minha Casa, Minha Vida (My House, My Life). The plan was to help those (at the time an estimated 50 million people) living in inadequate housing.45 It hasn’t exactly worked out that way.
The stereotypical image of Brazil’s favelas is one of substandard slums, of crime-ridden areas of poverty and lawlessness, where cowed residents live in fear of prowling gangs. There is a grain of truth to this stereotype, but for many favela residents, the reality is very different, and the homes they live in are simply the community-built social housing the state has failed to provide. They have grown in response to need, and are generally located in convenient locations, for both work and transport.
The same cannot be said for the Minha Casa, Minha Vida (MCMV) complexes, which have mostly been built on the far edges of the West Zone, an area which in 2010 was described by Ant?nio Augusto Veríssimo, director of Rio’s housing ministry, as a ‘regi?o dormitório’, a dormant region, because of its lack of jobs.46 In fact, Veríssimo discouraged the building of public housing in this area, for fear of creating ‘mais guetos de pobreza’ – more ghettos of poverty. Research from the London School of Economics has also found that the majority of those who have been resettled have been moved much further from their original homes than the 7 km distance allowed under municipal law.47
Luisa, forty-two, used to live in a favela in Rio’s wealthy South Zone, where, along with the Central and North Zones, the majority of jobs in Rio are to be found. ‘I walked out of my door and was practically already at work,’ she told a researcher for the Heinrich B?ll Foundation.48 ‘There was transportation going everywhere. I didn’t have to walk for miles just to get to a bus stop.’ She now lives in an MCMV condo in Campo Grande, in Rio’s underdeveloped West Zone, more than 50 km away from her old home.
With no jobs in the immediate vicinity, residents must travel up to three hours to the North and Central Zones using a transport infrastructure that can be described as limited at best. Over 60% of the new housing units are a thirty-minute walk from the nearest train or metro.49 And the failure to provide adequate public transport for those relocated from the centre to the outskirts of Rio impacts on women in particular because Rio follows the global trend of men dominating car ownership: 71% of cars are owned by men, and men are twice as likely as women to travel using individual vehicles.50
It also particularly impacts on women because of their unpaid care-work responsibilities. Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia, a researcher at LSE, told me about the panic of a woman she interviewed who had just been told that she was being moved to an MCMV complex. Pregnant and already a mother of two, she was only able to work because she could rely on her mother for childcare. Being moved 70 km away from her mother and her workplace would make keeping her job impossible. And in the new MCMV complexes what little childcare provision exists has ‘not been renovated or expanded to attend to the new residents’.51
The failure to provide childcare is exacerbated by the design of the government’s new complexes. The apartments themselves have been designed for traditional nuclear families – but the nuclear family is by no means the standard family unit in a favela. ‘It’s very rare that you go into a home in a favela and there aren’t three generations living there,’ says Dr Theresa Williamson, a Rio-based urban planning expert, adding that she’s ‘never seen an elderly person living on their own in a favela’. Similarly, the majority of the households Arrigoitia interviewed were single mothers, often with both children and an older parent living with them. But the standardised design of these ‘super tiny’ housing units ‘didn’t respond at all to the potential variety of families’, and a side effect is that the childcare solution that intergenerational favela living often provides has been excluded from the new complexes by design.