HerCollective's Goals for 2022

TW: This blogpost refers to sensitive matters around the subject area of women and queer people and the built environment, including violence.

As we explained in our introductory post, all of our work centres around feminist and gender inclusive practice, spanning across architecture and urban planning. We thought this might be a good opportunity - as we venture into 2022 - to outline our goals for the year, and the main research projects we are hoping to undertake.

The first project is the development of workshop processes that can be applied within academia and public and private practice to ensure that designers are - at the very least - considering the impact of inclusivity amongst their site and project analysis. We hope to encourage a critical thinking towards public space, using photography, community engagement, case studies and our own projects as a basis. We believe that the future generations of architecture and urban planning need to understand gender equality as a contributor to achieving sustainability, and hope that this is a good initiator to that thinking during their academic career. We will be doing our first test workshop in March, and hope to share more on this as we go!

Study of community infrastructure in use.

Our other main research project is an investigation of the practical application of female-centred mixed use space within historic environments. The project will build on our previous research into women in placemaking, and community infrastructure. It will encapsulate the opportunities and constraints on the physicality of mixed use that supports women within historic cities, with a case study in Leith. It will consider, and test, community participatory pedagogies that allow women and femme people to reclaim space that has previously made them feel unsafe, and tell the stories of these women within a final exhibition in Leith. We hope that this project can be further translated in the form of a design guide for further practice, and lead to a change in Scottish architecture and urban planning policy to include gender equality as a future priority.

Do you think that these projects are something you would be interested in supporting or getting involved with? We're currently at early stages of organising funding, and would be open to any opportunities that could push these projects to their full potential. Thinking of something else that we could collaborate with you on? We're always open to projects that aid in opening up the dialogue on gender! Please drop us a message, we'd love to hear from you!