In Conversation with Blanca Valdivia from Col·lectiu Punt 6
Blanca Valdivia is a sociologist, an urban planner and a founding member of the Barcelona-based feminist cooperative Col.lectiu Punt6. The Cooperative brings together sociologists, architects and urban planners who work on the rethinking of community and public spaces through an intersectional feminist lens with an emphasis on community participation. For many years she has focused her research and work around the idea of caring cities and feminist urban planning.
Can you introduce yourself briefly?
I’m Blanca Valdivia, a sociologist, I hold a PhD in Urban Management and Valuation from the Barcelona School of Architecture, with a doctoral thesis titled “Caring City: Quality of Life from a Feminist Perspective.” I am a founding member of the cooperative Col·lectiu Punt6. We have been working since 2005 and formalized as a cooperative at the end of 2015. In over 17 years, we have completed more than 400 projects in over 130 cities and towns, rethinking public, community, and domestic spaces from an intersectional feminist perspective.
What does it mean for you to think about cities and urban planning from a feminist and care perspective?
Thinking about cities and urban planning from a feminist and care perspective means first questioning how the city and territories have been constructed from an androcentric viewpoint, standardizing and homogenizing needs based on the experiences of an imagined standard man. In challenging this traditional androcentric view of urbanism, it also questions the dichotomy of the public and private arena that assigns public spaces and productive activities to men and domestic spaces and care activities to women. This questioning of the public or private dichotomy and city construction also implies examining how all activities related to the productive sphere have been prioritized for economic benefit and commodification. This prioritization has led to certain uses and activities being emphasized in the configuration of public spaces, their location, public transport routes, public service hours, and more. We found that this androcentric configuration penalizes activities that are not linked to the productive sphere or hegemonic productive activities. Therefore, feminist urbanism’s initial step is to criticize traditional urbanism, questioning the need to incorporate a different perspective and a diversity of needs and experiences. Additionally, it proposes a shift from a focus on productivity to prioritizing the sustainability of life, recognizing that all aspects of life should be at the centre of urban decisions. To achieve this, we need to rethink spaces, a task that feminist urbanism has extensively worked on through the development of methodologies, key concepts, and criteria.
What does urban planning that puts women and girls in the centre look like?
Well, first, when we talk about women and girls, we need to incorporate an intersectional perspective, understanding that not all women and girls have the same needs. The gender axis interacts with other axes of oppression and privilege, such as racialization, social class, functional diversity, origin, etc. From that starting point, it’s crucial to consider how this diversity of needs among women and girls can be satisfied in the territory. This involves different aspects that vary greatly, and for us, the cross-cutting axes are care, security, and participation. When we talk about care, it means ensuring that our cities can provide physical support for all care activities we engage in daily. When we talk about care, we approach it from a holistic perspective that considers care for individuals, care for ourselves, care for the community, and care for the environment. Regarding security, we address the perspective of the perception of safety, acknowledging that women continue to be victimized by sexist violence. Perceptions of safety influence how we navigate the city on a daily basis and how we asses risk and make decisions that leads us to avoid certain areas of the city at specific times, among other considerations. We understand participation as the recognition that, as women, we have been invisible in decision-making processes, both as technical experts and as community members. In this sense, we need to leverage one of the contributions of feminist urbanism, which is precisely to value the expert knowledge held by local residents, especially women. In our experience, most women don’t speak solely from their individual experiences, but also voice the needs of the community and the collective experience.
What challenges does your collective face in designing inclusive and caring cities? What difficulties and challenges have you encountered in your 17 years of work?
We live, after all, in a profoundly capitalist and deeply patriarchal society, two systems that mutually reinforce each other. The major challenges lie in the resistance to relinquishing privileges. It is therefore important for us to discuss feminist urbanism from a non-naive perspective. If we are going to create a feminist city, it doesn’t mean that everyone will benefit. It means that some must give up or lose privileges for us to have cities and territories that are fairer for everyone. This entails, for example, fewer spaces for cars, less prioritization and encouragement of consumerism, growth patterns, etc. We must emphasize that some people will lose privileges. For instance, perhaps one may no longer be able to drive directly to their doorstep because our goal is to prioritize excellent public transportation and a city that is walkable for everyone — the most universal and equitable mode of transportation or mobility.
Can you share examples of projects where you’ve participated in designing cities with a care perspective? How do these projects emerge, what challenges do they face, and what are some of the results?
Well, we have undertaken various projects over the years, such as security audits in transportation systems. Through understanding the needs of users and workers, we’ve been able to identify the issues that create a perception of insecurity in public transportation. From there, we establish criteria for both management and physical changes that need to be implemented to enhance security. Another type of projects we have done involves exploratory marches, a methodology inherent to feminist urbanism. In this case, with us as facilitators, a group of women walks through a specific location exchanging thoughts on specific locations or characteristics of the area that generate a sense of insecurity and those that instil a feeling of safety.. The aim is to identify and implement improvements in this lived environment. We have also worked on feminist collective housing projects, particularly more recently, aiming to support feminist housing community initiatives. Another project focuses on care indicators, analysing how our municipality provides physical care support, from urban elements to the overall structure of the territory, including care infrastructure (such as facilities and public spaces). Additionally, there are more advocacy-oriented projects, particularly concerning public restrooms. The truth is, there is a wide variety of projects we work with.
As for challenges, we operate as a technical team, and our projects are typically linked to a diagnostic phase. Consequently, they tend to be time-limited and, being somewhat like commissions, have a definite beginning and end. Furthermore, although we are urban planners and architects, we usually are engaged in the phase preceding architectural design. Instead of designing a square, for example, we establish criteria for what needs to be done to design that square. This poses a challenge, especially with changes in government, shifts in political will, and alterations in technical preferences. Throughout the project’s lifecycle, there is the difficulty of ensuring that our work doesn’t end up in a drawer but, rather, has a tangible technical and political impact and is executed.
Over the years, have you observed any changes in the emphasis on awareness of the importance of care in public policies?
Certainly, yes. We approach care from an urban dimension, which is not so common. In the Spanish State, especially in Catalonia, there is a whole series of policies aimed at strengthening the public management of care due to significant deficiencies. Spain is a welfare state, but in a Mediterranean style. This means that public welfare is heavily supported by civil society, and to a large extent, by families. In this sense, women continue to play a crucial role in caregiving, especially for dependent and elderly individuals. Care is indeed gaining a more central place in the political agendas of Catalonia, directly influencing specific actions and policies, but these efforts remain somewhat superficial. Many initiatives tend to stay at the diagnostic stage or involve very specific actions and often fall short of being fully implemented. There is definitely more work to be done.
If you would like to read more about Blanca Valdivia´s work, you can find some of her publications here.
If you would like to read more about Colectiu Punt 6, you can read more about their work and access some of their resources here. You can also read some of the publications produced by this cooperative here.
