Feminist City

“Any settlement is an inscription in space of the social relations in the society that built it. Our cities are patriarchy written in stone, brick, glass and concrete.” - Jane Darke\r\nThis thesis responds to questions on how feminism, equity, & activism may present through contemporary architecture. How can we challenge historic socio-spatial barriers?

What type of architecture would activism create? How can activist networks reshape a city to establish wider societal change? This project proposes new spatial typologies centred on political engagement, co-work & co-living, drawing from spatial representation within historic protest action. By applying an intersectional feminist lens to post-covid society, we identified Liverpool’s Central Business District as testing ground for our hypothesis, countering this traditionally patriarchal context to pave way for new discourse. The key project challenge lay in how to translate theory into design. Working at different scales to analyse forms of change-making (around the kitchen table; the public space of the streets; the digital realm), our proposal ties programme to physical design. This then envisions an activism-focused initiative as a multitude of community services that tackle equity issues. We hypothesised modelling societal change through studying an individual site/design, with this operational model then providing conclusions which would be scalable to wider society. Therefore, our thesis reads at two scales: the site-specific scheme represented in our final design; and as a wider set of principles or guidelines which further designers may interpret as their own ‘Feminist City’. Use of situated testing allowed us to assess the project success against our devised framework. This meant the thesis output could be applied across multiple sites & cities to initiate social change, with the site-designed scheme demonstrating how these ‘guidelines’ may be interpreted contextually. Sustainability formed a crucial project driver from the beginning, naturally aligning with a feminist design agenda. This holistic, intersectional approach proved necessary to support a viable society in terms of economic, social & environmental sustainability. Our outputs present a community-oriented model of how a society can operate socially, economically, and environmentally, whilst pushing for change through activism against the existing systemic, hierarchical approach to living.