The era when Le Corbusier's Modulor—the perfect man—was the only one “allowed” to occupy our cities and architecture is long gone. Decades ago, it became clear that environments were being designed as ideological representations that failed to reflect actual demand and its rich diversity of social class, gender, race, age group, and sexual orientation, among other factors. Planning and design were often disguised as “neutral” concepts, while in reality they reproduced the perspective of a middle-class white man. Ultimately, the time has come for the city to move past this flawed assumption of universal appropriation and instead materialize in its spaces the specific needs of every citizen.
However, integrating a gender perspective into design across different scales, though prominent in theoretical studies and practical experiments, still has a long way to go before cities stop reproducing these intrinsic relations of patriarchal, capitalist, and racist exploitation and dominance. This underscores the growing urgency of developing guidelines to guide public policies, government bodies, and institutions toward overcoming gender disparities, particularly in urban design. This intersectional approach is essential to boosting the effectiveness of public policies, ensuring more democratic and inclusive governance for all genders and sexual orientations.
