As for public space in the MCMV complexes, this is more or less limited to ‘huge car parks’, despite the fact that very few people have cars, and ‘horribly maintained playgrounds’ with equipment that is so cheap it is destroyed within a couple of months (and not replaced). The complexes seem designed with privacy rather than community in mind. For the families used to the intimacy of the favela where, explains Williamson, ‘your kid doesn’t necessarily even need childcare after a certain age, because everybody is always watching them’, this often translates into isolation and fear of crime. The upshot is that ‘kids aren’t outside as much, they stay in their apartments’. And ‘suddenly women do need to be watching their kids in a way they didn’t used to in the favela’. Suddenly they need childcare. And they don’t have any.
This isn’t even an issue of resources. It’s an issue of priorities. Brazil spent millions on public transport infrastructure in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. The money was there, it was just being spent elsewhere. LSE Cities research found that the new Bus Rapid Transit corridors tended to privilege areas where Olympic facilities were located, leaving ‘the problem of collective transport between the poorer resettlements and downtown [. . .] unattended’.52 Furthermore, according to residents, government relocation priorities seemed to be less about helping those who needed better housing and more about making way for the upcoming World Cup and Olympics infrastructure development.
And so the women pay. Cristine Santos lost her job in a market in Nova Igua?u after she was moved to the Vivenda Das Patativas complex in Campo Grande. ‘I had to take three buses,’ she explained.53 Another woman was so exhausted from her daily commute of up to six hours, that she had a near-fatal car accident.54 With few other options open to them women have taken to setting up shop in their new homes, selling drinks, preparing lunch plates, cutting people’s hair. But they have to do it in the knowledge that it could get them evicted, because in doing so they are flouting zoning regulations. Turning your home into your workplace is an option in favela living because there are no zoning regulations in place: the whole area is already technically illegal. This is not the case with the government’s public housing, where, being a residential zone, running a business from your home is strictly forbidden.
So, to sum up, the Brazilian government moved women away from the formal workplace (and indeed the informal workplace: women dominate Brazil’s 7.2 million domestic workers) and provided them with inadequate public transport and no childcare.55 In so doing, they practically forced women to turn their homes into their workplace, by making this the one option that is realistically open to them. And they’ve made it illegal.
Public housing doesn’t have to be this way: but the alternative does require thought. When Vienna’s public officials decided to build a new housing complex in 1993, they first defined ‘the needs of the people using the space’ and then looked for technical solutions to meet those needs, explains Eva Kail.56 What this meant was collecting data, specifically sex-disaggregated data, because the ‘people’ this housing was intended to serve were women.
Surveys compiled at the time by Austria’s national statistics agency revealed that women spent more time per day than men on household chores and childcare.57 (According to the latest World Economic Forum figures Austrian women spend double the time men spend on unpaid work, and more time overall on paid and unpaid work combined.)58 And so, explains Kail, officials designed the housing complex Frauen-Werk-Stadt I (Women-Work-City I – there has since been a II and a III) to cater for women’s caring needs.
First came the location, which, Kail says, was carefully chosen to make it easier for women to carry out their caring responsibilities. The complex is right next to a tram stop, has a kindergarten on-site and is close to schools, meaning children can travel on their own from an early age (Sánchez de Madariaga tells me that one of the biggest time drains for women is ‘escorting kids to school, to doctors, and to extracurricular activities’). A doctor’s practice, a pharmacy and commercial space for other shops are all included within the complex, and there is a large supermarket nearby. It is the ultimate in mixed-use design.
The design of FWS I is, in fact, rather like a purpose-built favela. It prioritises community and shared space. Interconnected buildings with a maximum of four units per floor stand around a series of shared courtyards (complete with grassy areas and children’s play spaces) which are visible from any unit in the project. Meanwhile, transparent stairwells visible to the outdoors, high levels of lighting in public spaces, and well-lit car parking accessible only via flats, were all designed to promote a sense of safety.59 Another housing complex in Vienna (Autofriere Mustersiedlung) dispensed with parking spaces altogether, bypassing the zoning rule that specifies one car parking space per new apartment.60 They instead spent the money on communal rooms and additional play areas. The complex was not specifically aimed at women, but given women are less likely to drive and more likely to care for children than men, the outcome is nevertheless one that caters to women’s housing and care needs.
Care work is also built into the interior of the open-floor plan FWS I flats. The kitchen is at the heart of each flat, its visible lines of sight to the rest of the home mirroring the outer courtyard design. This not only enables women to keep an eye on children while working in the kitchen, it also places housework at the heart of the house: a subtle challenge to the idea that housework is solely a woman’s responsibility. Compare this to the tendency a local official in Philadelphia revealed she had to repeatedly check in developers of putting kitchens up on a third floor with no elevator: ‘Do you want to carry your groceries and strollers up to the third floor?’ she points out.61
CHAPTER 2
Gender Neutral With Urinals
In April 2017 veteran BBC journalist Samira Ahmed wanted to use a toilet. She was at a screening of I Am Not Your Negro at London’s famous Barbican arts centre, and it was the interval. Any woman who has ever been to the theatre knows what this means: a rush as soon as the lights go up to try to beat the inevitable queue that will soon be snaking it way across the foyer floor.
Women are used to queueing when they go out. It’s frustrating and puts a dampener on their evening. No nice interval chit-chat about the show with friends over a drink, just dull, tedious lining up, occasionally leavened by the knowing eye rolls they share with their fellow waiting women.
But this evening was different. This evening, the queue was worse than usual. Far worse. Because in an almost comically blatant display of not having thought about women at all, the Barbican had turned both the male and female toilets gender neutral simply by replacing the ‘men’ and ‘women’ signage with ‘gender neutral with urinals’ and ‘gender neutral with cubicles’. The obvious happened. Only men were using the supposedly ‘gender neutral with urinals’ and everyone was using the ‘gender neutral with cubicles’.
Rather than rendering the toilets actually gender neutral by this move, they had simply increased the provision for men: women are generally not able to use urinals, while men are of course able to use both urinals and cubicles. There were also no sanitary bins in the ‘gender neutral with urinals’ toilets. ‘Ah the irony of having to explain discrimination having just been to see I Am Not Your Negro IN YOUR CINEMA’, Ahmed tweeted, suggesting that the solution would be to ‘turn the gents into gender-neutral loos. There’s NEVER such a queue there & you know it.’1