World Streets: The Politics of Transport in Cities

RIYADH (AFP) –  Saudi women activists have called for a new day of defiance next month of the long-standing ban on women driving in the ultra-conservative kingdom.

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The latest news about increasing support of women in leadership positions in transport just in this morning from Hong Kong.

World Streets is firmly behind the movement to bring more women at all levels of society and in all countries into the heart of the process of understanding, planning and implementing fair mobility for all. Since 1973 the editor has been actively engaged in the movement to increase the role of women in the highest levels of leadership in public, private sectors and into the volunteer and NGO movement. At times this has been a lonely vigil, but as the French poet Louis Aragon told us some two generations ago: "La femme est l’avenir de l’homme" (Woman is the future of man). If you believe that, it makes you very hard to stop.

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Behind the Rape in the Bus

Over at India Streets today - http://www.facebook.com/IndiaStreets - the distinguished Indian journalist and writer, Vidyadhar Date, posts an article entitled "Rosa Parks, The Power of Resistance and the Rape In The Bus In Delhi". He makes a point which I believe is central to understanding  a great part of both (a) the what and (b) the why of this tragic event in Delhi, when he writes:

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11 October 2012: World Streets supports the full and active citizenship, rights and participation of women of all ages in every home, corner, school and  street of every city and every nation of this planet. See PLan International for today's announcement and a first round of background information on this important day.

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The French poet Louis Aragon told us some two generations ago that "Woman is the future of man". And if we had any doubts about that as we enter into 2012, we have today before our eyes this exceptional, moving photograph of a street demonstration yesterday in which several thousand brave women marched through central Cairo in an extraordinary expression of anger over images of soldiers beating, stripping and kicking female demonstrators in Tahrir Square.

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After the first article in this series appeared in these pages on July 27th, more than fifty people from a dozen countries responded with suggestions and nominations for profiles of outstanding women who through their work, character and originality are, quite literally, shaping and re-shaping the transportation agenda. Based on that strong response, their quality and the evident interest in the topic, we have decided to see if we can work with those making these nominations to provide a series of leadership profiles to improve the international visibility concerning the contributions that women are making in the field at all the key levels involved.

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29 July interim progress report:
This off-the-cuff collaborative brainstorm is proving a pure learning experience. We started out with a single long-held idea: i.e., the importance of getting all aspects of the sustainable transport planning and policy establishment on to a gender-level footing. And against that understanding we set out on Tuesday  to see if we could, with a little help from our friends, come up with a convincing list identifying a certain number of outstanding women leaders working in our field who, though their excellent preparation, their strong convictions and their courageous pioneering actions, are literally redrawing the new mobility map (and the mental maps) of our cities. And all that at a level of excellence that captures the attention of others in other places, and inspires them to study, emulate and perhaps even to surpass the original project, approach and policies.

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There has been a refreshingly enthusiastic reaction to our posting yesterday asking about the general deficiency of information on women leaders in the field of sustainable transport in cities. But one note came in from the prolific environmental educator and recognized policy adviser Elizabeth Deacon challenging us in these exact words: "I assume you think there are in fact women who have had an impact. But I then must also assume that your comments have gone unheeded. At the same time, one has to wonder what the criteria are for measuring “impact” – do you know???" Fair question.

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I wonder if I am the only person in the world who gets upset at this:

I am from time to time approached by groups and publications with in-progress lists identifying whom they see as the most influential people who are through their work and efforts shaping the sustainable transportation agenda, which they then ask me to comment, add to, etc.  Now what is to me most striking about these lists is that on almost all occasions they invariably consist not only of outstanding people, but almost entirely of names of males.

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It is a rare day that World Streets comes out in favor of cars in cities. But even that of course is not quite true. At best there will be plenty of cars in our cities, but they will not be parked and they will be chauffeuring not just their drivers but offering affordable services to flexible groups of people safely and efficiently. Great way to get around when you get it right.

And getting it right is the theme of the day today in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where, as you all surely are aware, a few – we will possibly never know the exact number – Saudi women have decided that they have a rightful place in society, in the public space, and that this also includes being behind the wheel when they need to get somewhere. And today is their great day: Women2Drive is social media-driven campaign and sisterhood project in which a certain number of intrepid women are getting behind the wheel and defying the Kingdom's long ban on female drivers. Here is a fine article from the New York Times  introducing the topic, and for more we and our readers will be adding more in the days to come.

La femme est l'avenir de l'homme. Or in English: Go for it Sisters.

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Bangladeshi women face significant barriers from family, neighbors and society in getting on a bike a riding around town in bright daylight. Freedom of mobility is seriously curtailed in Dhaka if women don’t feel safe to travel independently in their own city. Over 35% of female commuters in Dhaka depend on a cycle rickshaw and as more major roads ban these rickshaws, daily mobility for women is threatened furthermore. Arohi’s tagline: “Pedaling the way to empowerment” summarizes the links that we plan to draw between cycles, mobility and empowerment.

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Today is International Women's Day. And not only that, 2011 marks the one hundredth anniversary of this great and necessary idea. So what better occasion for World Streets to announce publicly, loudly and yet once again our firm belief that the most important single thing that our society, our nations and our cities could do to increase the fairness and the effectiveness of our transportation arrangements would be to make it a matter of the law that all decisions determining how taxpayer money is invested in the sector should be decided by councils that respect full gender parity. We invite you to join us in this challenge and make it one of the major themes of sustainable transport policy worldwide in 2011.

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Sustainable transport cannot be separated from sustainable cities. Nor sustainable cities from sustainable lives. Here is a small project from Sweden that takes as its goal to teach people how to balance and move safely around on a bike. But who in Sweden cannot climb on a cycle without a thought and toddle off? Well, among others immigrant women coming from Africa and the Middle East who find themselves living in this very different culture in which they are free to cycle like everyone else.

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[caption id="attachment_3848" align="alignright" width="215" caption="Source: BBC News, 27 Sept. 2010"][/caption]

We cannot of course be sure if you are following all of our web of key themes that together create the bedrock of World Streets, but two of these that are most important to us are (a) the importance of "pattern change" and, of course our old friends will say, (b) the role of women as not just passive passengers in a system designed by and mainly for men, but also active drivers of the changes that we now need to put in place to have mobility systems which are both sustainable and just as well as efficient. With this in view, let's share with you this morning  a very short video just in from the BBC in which one of Cairo's new female taxi drivers shares with us some of her views on her job and the attitudes it evokes in the people around on the street.

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We do not often provide coverage of conferences and their output, however World Streets is strongly  committed to the concept of taking women's needs as the prime target, the defining metric of transport policy and practice in cities and in rural areas.  (If you click to http://worldstreets.wordpress.com/category/women/ you will be taken to other articles in this W/S series and campaign.)

The International Workshop on Gender, Economic Integration and Cross-border Infrastructure Development aimed to discuss how regional economic integration strengthened by cross-border road networks has a differentiated effect based on gender, ethnicity and class. The workshop was organised in June in Bangkok by the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) Thailand and the Asia-Pacific Regional Secretariat of the International Forum for Rural Transport and Development (IFRTD). It was supported by the Japan-ASEAN Solidarity Fund, ASEAN Foundation, Asian Development Bank and global Transport Knowledge Partnership (gTKP).

Opening speeches were made by:

• Dr. Filemon A. Uriarte, Jr., Executive Director, ASEAN Foundation


• Mr. Tomoyuki Sakairi, First Secretary of Embassy of Japan


• Ms. Sonomi Tanaka, Principal Social Development Specialist (Gender & Development), ADB


• Prof. S. Rakshit , Vice President - Research, AIT


• Mr. Ranjith de Silva, Regional Coordinator of the IFRTD Asia and Pacific Secretariat.


• Dr. Kyoko Kusakabe described the outline of the workshop and a research study on gender carried out in the Mekong Region.

The workshop was conducted in two parallel Panels, in which all the presentations were categorised in the three themes below.

1. Transportation development and gendered mobility.


2. Transportation development and its social and gender impact.


3. Cross border trade and transportation development.

The final plenary of the workshop was a Panel discussion moderated by Ranjith de Silva, IFRTD Asia-Pacific Regional Coordinator.

Members of the Panel:

• Ms. Nite Tanzarn (IFRTD Board Member) from Uganda.


• Ms. Sonomi Tanaka, Principal Social Development Specialist (Gender & Transport) of the ADB


• Mr. Upali Pannilage. Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociology, university of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka.

The following issues and facts were taken up at the Panel discussion by the panelists and participants.

• Impacts of transport interventions on the earning power of women.


• Amount of gender disaggregated data made available from the Mekong Regional study. There was concern regarding the efficiency on the dissemination of baseline data of the Mekong research.


• Benefits of being closer to the intervention/border/bridge.


• Evidence of impacts needs to be delivered to relevant policy makers.


• The research and workshop outcomes should be shared with technical practitioner (e.g. engineers, planners) to enable them to mainstream social issues in their plans.


• The papers presented at the workshop can be categorised in to three aspects:
  
  
  
  • Direct relevancy to Gender and common to many countries in the region.
  
  
  • How to internalise this data into our work.
  
  
  • Some papers discussed facts within specific contexts and hence some issues in the sector were left out.
  
  
  
  


• Need for gender specific and gender neutral projects.


• Participation of beneficiaries at planning levels.


• No updating of good studies carried out earlier there is a need to look at the emergence of different gender needs due various social and economic changes in the present day context.


• Gender is not just about women.


• We need to encourage a wider audience thinking about gender and transport issues.


• The transport sector appears to have changed the gender roles.

Moving forward:

1. Influencing and lobbying should not be stopped.


2. Invest in research that in turn is an investment in policy changes.


3. Further strengthening the gender analytical capacities.


4. Do not store the research findings and evidence but use them.


5. Gender is a subject to be included in university curricula.


6. How to do the “updating” of data?

The full papers presented at the workshop can be accessed here:

www.ifrtd.org/en/full.php?id=527

The Power Point presentations and full proceedings will soon be available at the IFRTD and AIT websites respectively at http://ifrtd.org and http://203.159.12.5:8082/AIT/.

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