Reimagining Our Cities: Feminist Vision of Smart Cities for a Better World

This paper explores the need for reimagining our cities from a feminist visioning perspective to recreate them as ‘Smart Cities’ for a better world. It advocates the urgency for evolving a human rights-based urban planning model — which is inclusive, caters to a life-cycle approach, is citizen friendly and gender responsive.

This paper redefines and decodes ‘SMART Cities’ to cater to the following dimensions :

1. Safety Specifics for all age groups, genders and ethnicities.
2. It invokes the need for switching to participatory and gender-friendly Methodology of City-Planning through use of tools like social mapping, brainstorming, focus-group discussions, opinion polls and moving from ‘Blueprint Master Plans of Cities’ to ‘Pink Print pro-people Plans’ of the cities of our dreams.
3. It also flags the agenda for Affirmative Action for redesigning of our cities to nurture positive spaces and support structures for peaceful co-existence of all communities.
4. An attempt is made to Review  existing gender-gaps in our present day city-planning and identify gender-responsive needs for cities of the future, aspiring to become ‘Smart Cities’.
5. The need to foster greater Transformative Potential by recognising the gendered nature of public-space and bridging this divide through institutionalizing greater accountability checks and transparency by way of promoting social and gender audits for concurrent review of city plans from their conception to creation.