In Conversation with Annika Dalén
Annika Dalén is a Gender Equality and Strategic Development Officer at the city of Umeå, Sweden. In her work, she focuses on gender in relation to social sustainability, urban planning, mobility and climate change on a local level. She has more than 15 years of experience working with gender equality and human rights issues in both Sweden and Latin America.
Could you introduce yourself and tell us about yourself and your work?
I am Annika Dalén, and I live in Umeå, a city in the north of Sweden. Here I work in the municipality as a gender equality officer. I work in a department that deals with overarching and strategic development issues. So, we are a lot of people who work with different strategic thematic issues such as climate change, gender equality, and sustainable growth. At the municipality, we have a really broad interdisciplinary team; my colleagues have a wide range of backgrounds. This is kind of unique to how Umeå has worked with gender equality. As you may know, a lot of cities in Sweden have worked with gender equality, but in general, in those cases, the gender equality officer has been organizationally placed in the HR department, which means that you work a lot with anti-discrimination and with the municipality as an employer (because municipalities are also really big employers). In these cases, the focus becomes workplace equal treatment and anti-discrimination. In other municipalities, the work for gender equality has been very closely connected to social services and with the work around gender-based violence prevention specifically.
Unlike these cases, in the Umeå municipality, gender equality work has organizationally been placed in connection to the planning department. This means that gender equality has been closely connected to how we build and develop the physical environment and how we go about planning the city. We, of course, also have urban planners in our department and we work closely with them, giving input on and for a more comprehensive planning.
Can you tell us about your work with the “gendered landscape” approach at Umeå Kommun and your work on gender equality in urban planning? Why and how did it come about?
The “gendered landscape” is a lot of things at the same time. It is in a way both a method of analysis and a way for storytelling and communicating gender equality issues. It started in 2009 when we did a statistics report on Umeå on gender equality and gender differences based on Sweden´s national goals for gender equality. We thought the results were really interesting, but it was also kind of boring to do a report solely based on statistics. We also wanted people to understand what we had found. The challenge was therefore to find a way in which we could communicate this differently, and also work on raising awareness and showing what gender means in everyday life.
We wanted to reflect on what gender equality meant when we moved around in the city. One of my colleagues created a guided tour around the city with stops at different locations where it is possible to learn more about examples of how we work with gender equality in the physical space. One of the stops in that guided tour, for example, is a daycare which is also the first public daycare in Umeå. At that stop, we talk about childcare policies and what these mean for women’s participation in the labour market and how that structurally affects who can work in society, and who cannot. We also have a stop in the guided tour that is a school where we talk about career choices and education, and how in both these areas there is still a lot of gender disparity. We also have a stop on a tunnel under the train station, where we worked a lot on questions of gender and safety in public spaces while it was being built. We see the tunnel as a good example of how to work with perceptions of safety in these types of built environments.
How does an urban planning that is concerned with designing for women and girls look like in practice?
I think that there’s no, one-size-fits-all answer to that. What is important is to look at the specific local context and what are some of the conditions we find there. At the municipality, we work a lot in coordination with other cities in Europe. In this, we have learned that contexts can vary immensely, and with them, the strategies that are needed also vary. Things like what does the labour market look like, for example, where are the workplaces located in a city and how is the distribution of unpaid care-work, what does the provision of public transport look like? And also, things like the local history, and the socio-demographics of the population.
In this sense, I think that an important starting point is to understand well the local context, and this requires access to statistics and also gender-disaggregated data. I know that some municipalities have their own statistics unit which is a great advantage. But there is also data available by national authorities which you can get for the municipal level. We have also worked many times along with the universities with surveys, having master students collaborating with us, doing their research on relevant matters, etc. There are a lot of ways how we can get this context-specific data. But I think that the basis is to have an understanding of who lives here, how are people living, and how lived experiences in our city differ across socio-demographic groups. When we understand that we have a good basis to do planning and have an understanding of how such planning will potentially affect these groups. And then a second point would be to allow ourselves to consider whose lives are improving by implementing one solution versus another solution; whose everyday lives would be made easier by this measure and whose lives would be complicated by it.
There is an abundance of research on inclusive approaches to urban planning. Many practitioners support it. Yet, we are lagging. Why do you think it is hard to work with inclusivity in practice when it comes to planning living environments?
In general, what I’ve seen in other contexts when they want to work for example with gender is that they work in an ad-hoc way. This results in working with planning as usual, in the way it is always been done, and then at the end of the process, one stops and thinks “Let’s see if we can incorporate the perspective of vulnerable groups”. In this way, these perspectives aren’t reflected in the critical questions that determine the foundation of a project. I think that’s an important problem.
If we look at the success factors for Umeå municipality when working in more inclusive ways, we see that we have had continuous and strong political support. This is crucial as well. It is really difficult to have a gender quality officer sitting in an office completely isolated, having them trying to open doors and trying to get in every meeting to say, “Hey don’t forget about me, you need to involve me in this process”. But if you have a mandate that comes from the upper management and is supported by the politicians who demand to see results in this area, then the situation changes. In this sense, it’s really important to have this top-down support. This I think is lacking in many other contexts.
Lastly, nowadays, on a European level, we see a lot of talk and a lot of new policies on gender equality, but I think that sometimes it stops at a very general level with policies that don’t challenge the status quo and power structures. For example, there will be claims that “we need to help women get into these male-dominated sectors” but maybe we need to instead challenge the men who are taking up all the space. In the same way, there is a lot of talk about including vulnerable groups, or minorities, that never really tackles challenging power and privilege. That is where we need to work if we want to achieve some real change.
If you would like to read more about Annika´s work, here is a link to a publication made by her on the connection between urban planning, gender and climate neutrality. If you would like to read more about the gendered landscape work in Umeå municipality, here you can find a video that dives deeper into this topic. If you would like to read more about how Umeå municipality works with gender equality you can follow this link.
