Urban Planning and its Feminist Histories

Abstract

Urban Planning and its Feminist Histories identifies and amplifies women’s roles in shaping the institutions, ideas, and educational practices that comprised the field of planning in North America throughout the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the United States in the 1960s through the 1990s. My narrative of the relationships between feminist activism, spatial practice, higher education, and the politics of knowledge production reveals feminism’s contradictory legacy in shaping contemporary approaches to planning practice, theory, and education. Based on forty-two interviews with planning scholars in the U.S. and Canada, my cross-generational oral history research is read in light of feminist scholarship and archival documents from planning schools and organizations, women’s interest groups, collectives, and task forces, and community-based organizations and collectives. An interdisciplinary project, this dissertation draws from and contributes to the history of social movements, planning education and practice, and related fields such as architecture, geography, urban history, and women’s and gender studies.

Beginning in the late 1960s, an emerging social and political focus in the field of planning attracted women participating in a long tradition of female-headed housing and community development activism. Bolstered by equal opportunity legislation and increased federal funding for research on women’s and urban issues, the first substantial group of women to become planning scholars began their academic careers in the 1970s. These women produced feminist knowledge about gender, race, class, and the city by forming educational collectives and lobbying groups, convening conferences, and creating publishing outlets alongside members of the nascent Women’s Studies movement. The activist and community-engaged roots of the first generation of feminist planning academics equipped them to develop new paradigms for planning theory and epistemology that centered participation and everyday experience, as well as spearheading community studio learning models in planning classrooms. At the same time, these feminist planners, architects, designers, and community development and housing advocates staked a claim in both activist and academic spaces for the important role of space, place, and the urban environment in feminist thought and practice.

In the late 1980s and early 90s, women shaped the landscape of the planning academy by moving into leadership roles and founding the Faculty Women’s Interest Group (FWIG) within the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP). Through FWIG and various ACSP initiatives and committees, they built a professional support network and led efforts for gender and racial diversity among planning faculty, students, and research. While this dissertation demonstrates how the first feminist scholars carved out discursive and institutional space in the planning academy, it also reveals that this is not an entirely victorious story. I also examine the theoretical and practical consequences of women’s early activism in the academy through the experiences of scholars who struggled in academia, were denied tenure, and/or were pushed out of planning to a different discipline. In contrast to the initial group, comprised mostly of white women, this pool of interviewees consists primarily of BIPOC women whose stories provide a crucial intergenerational and intersectional perspective on shifting barriers and priorities that parallel broader trends in feminist movements. I present their perspectives on how these women were largely alienated from institutional gains in the 1990s, how their scholarship was marginalized, and how they have helped each other survive and thrive.