Women's participation as a lever for the urban regeneration of public spaces

Social and urban interventions in regeneration projects allow cities to focus more on disadvantaged areas and to urbanise differently. This allows a more intelligent use of urban spaces. For this to happen, citizens must be involved in the development of their city and be active in planning policies. Indeed, the diversity of problems to be solved in complex urban spaces invites the development of innovative approaches capable of mobilising the relevant resources and actors. This approach often requires the setting up of meeting places (living labs) where inhabitants (and users of the territory) and local actors (public, private, associations) can meet, exchange and share their skills and knowledge in order to contribute to the development of the city.

In this essay we focus on the importance of involving women in this process of co-creation and urban renewal. Women's participation is often neglected or poorly supported by planners. We will examine this in an exploratory walk followed by a focus group, with women who live in a neighbourhood and women who do not know the neighbourhood at all. We tried to point out the qualities, opportunities and dysfunctions of the neighbourhood in question, and thus to enrich the reflections concerning its improvement. This showed that the newly built infrastructures have not been fully appropriated by the women and that they have not improved the social fabric, in addition to the fact that the marginalised are not always present. In addition, there is a sense of insecurity felt by women in public spaces due to prejudice or the quality of the urban space. The results of this research confirm that the involvement of women in a process of planning and transformation of cities is essential to promote democracy and foster social capital. Thus, it is necessary to go beyond the classical approaches, where public space (and its facilities) has been designed and built by men for men.