Vaissnavi Shukl
We have been talking extensively about housing this season, but have not really looked at the identity of the cities within which it exists. In today’s episode, we zoom out a little to take stock of new capital cities and discuss their planning through the theoretical lens of feminism, with the support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the fine arts, we speak to Dorina Pojani, Associate Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Queensland, about how a feminist approach to design of these new capitals has the potential to introduce the ethics of care into larger planning practices.

I am Vaissnavi Shukl, and this is Architecture Off-Centre. A podcast where we highlight contemporary discourses that shape the built environment but do not occupy the centre stage and daily lives. We speak to radical designers, thinkers and change makers, who are deeply engaged in redefining the way to live and interact with the world around us.

So Dorina, when we think about these new capital cities, they often come across as these very visually grand, almost utopian spaces. So when you’re scrolling through Instagram and you see, you know, “Travel with me to Rome”, or “travel with me to Hong Kong”, or, you know, “New York”, or any, any large city, it’s just almost this utopian idea of what a city would be like, as if everything is perfect, but then beneath all that beauty, there’s a lot of economic disparity which is often overshadowed or not shown or not spoken about like popular context. What do you think, first of all, causes this disconnect between the visual appeal of the cities and the lived reality of the residents, especially the marginalized communities?

Dorina Pojani
Sure. Well, there are two parts to your question, right to answering your question. In my book choke cities, I didn’t look at all capitals. I looked at new capitals, so the ones that have been built in the 20th century and 21st century. So they are grand, just like you say they’re certainly grand, but I wouldn’t say they’re beautiful, and that’s because, I think it’s because the design has sought to immortalize particular leaders or particular designers, rather than reflect the culture and the identity of a community. So that’s part of the problem, but they’re certainly segregated, unequal in terms of both income and in terms of visuals. So we see cities like Brazilia, for example, that has the pilot plan, the original pilot plan where government bureaucrats live, the ones that earn decent salaries. But then there are also, men, sort of impoverished people that live outside of the pilot plan. The pilot plan itself, for example, has been frozen in time. It has become a UNESCO heritage site. And poor people live in smaller towns, more like Brazil, rather than an alien creature from outer space, the way the ball play looks. And those poor people are unfortunately dependent on the monumental part of the city, because that’s where they work. So they never take a new long distance from the suburbs and Brazil is already sort of an older case study amongst the seven that I studied. So it was done in the 1950s but newer case studies, they suffer from the same problem. For example, I went to Naypyidaw, the new capital of Myanmar, Burma, for those that know it as Burma, and it is the same issue. I mean, there is this monumental new city that’s been created, sort of plot in the middle of the jungle away from the coast. And the people that serve the city are in villages Burmese, looking regular, regular villages and towns. And they have to commute into this new city, that it’s monumental in this case, that that’s an interesting case, actually, because the monumental aspects are difficult to see. So there are these ministry buildings, but you can’t even walk past and they’re so hidden from sight for security purposes. There is housing that accommodates government brokers, and that housing is color coded based on rank. So very, very hierarchical, the hierarchy of government and the patriarchy reflected in the built environment. But poor people don’t have access to any of the net.

Vaissnavi Shukl
While you were describing these cities, of course, as an Indian, the only, and probably the first city that comes to my mind is Chandigarh, again, design post independence in the 50s by Corbusier, based on these extremely modern concrete looking ginormous Secretariat buildings, government buildings set and laid out as that kind of model town. Also, one could argue that if you were to read the city, it is also built on a deeply hierarchical structure. So you have a core which has these ministry buildings, and then you have housing. And then, of course, as a new city, it seems kind of scrubbed clean and sanitized, and then doesn’t really speak to the growth of all these organic urban structures that kind of come up as cities grow. My question is, how do we, even when you’re looking at these hierarchical cities, which are apparently not designed as hierarchical, but I mean, they kind of are, how do we shift? How do we begin to shift towards a more equitable, people centered approach, if there is one. And then, if you are kind of thinking about that kind of ideal city, what might a city that breaks away from these hierarchical structures start to look like and start to live in like, or we lived in like?

Dorina Pojani
So it is interesting. You mentioned Chandigarh. It was one of my case studies. And all my other case studies are national capitals. Chandigarh is sort of unique because it’s a state capital, but I did include it because, for one, it is the capital of a very large state, Punjab, right? Which in Europe, for example, that would be a country, right? There are three countries that are a lot smaller than Punjab in terms of population, and then Haryana later became capital of Haryana, as well as Capital Territory. So it’s quite important. And it was the first post colonial venture, the new post colonial India. So in that sense, I felt there was the attempt for Chandigarh to embody the nation and stand in contrast to Delhi, which is also a new city, but it was a colonial so I wanted to look at so how did the new India want to represent itself? And funny enough, instead of this being a domestic product, before an architect was invited again to do the work. And the shortcomings of Chandigarh today, the hierarchy, the severe hierarchies, the inequalities in adult city, tries to hide those, but they’re there underneath the veneer. I see them as originating with the conception of the city, though, the way it was designed. So there was this great architect in charge, Le Corbusier. He had direct access to Pandit Nehru, the first leader of the first post colonial leader, leader of India. They could literally, I mean, people have told me that they could literally talk on the phone to one another. Le Corbusier would get into sort of arguments with the local bureaucrats and architect designers he was working with, and he could just go and call Nehru on the phone directly and solve the problem. So it was these two male figures larger than life, egos and personalities, that designed the city together, and in that sense, this city, like all my other case studies, reflects the patriarchy. So if a city reflects the patriarchy, it cannot possibly be gender equal. How could it? That’s the problem right there from the very inception. But it is very unfortunate in the case of Chandigarh, because the original idea was to create an egalitarian city. Even the looks of the city are a little bit like Eastern European socialist towns, right? I’m from Eastern Europe. Myself, originally from Albania, and so when I went to Chandigarh, I could see many similarities with new cities in Albania and the rest of Eastern Europe. So there was this pretense to create an egalitarian city. And that pretense and promise, actually promise to the Indian people, was eventually broken. And some of my other case studies, it’s a different story. I mean, in some, in some, there was no initial expectation that the city was going to be egalitarian in any way, gender egalitarian, or egalitarian in terms of income. For example, there is the new capital of Kazakhstan, Astana, and that one, people adapted the Dubai of step. Because the whole city is about spectacle, high rises, statistical buildings, lights, etc. So it’s a hub for capital investment. Practically, there was, from the beginning, it was meant to showcase the prowess of the whole socialist Kazakhstani government. No, no pretense of equality. But Chandigarh really does break my heart, in a sense, because it was meant to be this equal socialist city, and it’s not.

Vaissnavi Shukl
You alluded to the big egos of the men involved in designing of capital cities, and especially Chandigarh, with Jawaharlal Nehru as the first post independence Prime Minister. And this, this European architect, kind of star architect who’s come down to, you know, impose a grid over a flat land. And, I mean, cities, look at it, have always been spaces of opportunity. You mentioned Kazakhstan, the capital, as a place for capital investments. Dubai is pretty same. These are like economic hubs that are in the making. One always wonders, you know, if these cities are in the making with a certain goal? Who are they for? So if you look at newer capitals, are they for those foreign investors? Are they for capital gains? What do we think about the role of people involved in designing of these cities? You know, what do we think about the role of women involved in the design of these cities? And then in your experience, because you’ve done like a parallel studies of different cities across the globe, how do you think we can bring women to the forefront of urban development, not just as users, but as creators, and what’s your reading of gender when it comes to the design of these capital cities?

Dorina Pojani
Yeah, these are all. These are all great questions. A lot to unpack there. Well, I feel, for one thing, a lot of well, the initial impetus for creating these capitals was often the desire to express the identity of a post colonial nation. Um, take, for example, the case of Abuja Nigeria, the new capital of Nigeria. So Nigeria is a country that was one of my case studies. So that’s why I bring this up. So Nigeria is a country that didn’t really have an um, local identity before the British got there, and then the colonizers got there, and sort of grouped together all these different tribes, all with completely different identities. Each of them could be a separate nation, and decided that because people looked similar to the colonizers, they were all black, they could all together in one nation. And that’s not how nationhood works, right? People need to feel some identity. You can’t group people together just because they look all the white, or they all look black, or they all look Asian. That’s a recipe for disaster, right there. However, that’s the country that the Nigerians inherited after independence. So then there was this idea in the new government that, well now we try to create this or represent our new nation in a new capital. So that was the original purpose. But I feel like in this capital, as in other capital that I’ve studied, that initial promise or premise sort of was not realized. And then these cities, Abuja and the other cities gradually became hubs for capital investment. That’s what happens. And in some cases, they also became hubs for all manner of underhanded deals, corruption, etc. So there is this notion in Nigeria, ‘the Abuja contracts’, because there is all this opportunity there to to make money in real estate, in legitimate ways, and that’s a story we see we see in other capitals as well.

As far as women go, women were not invited to the table when these cities were designed, nor later on. And even in the cases where there was supposed to be some equality in the beginning, they did not end up equal in terms of income later on. And they certainly did not end up equal in terms of gender. I mean, even when I study my list Canberra, which is, you know, here in Australia where I live. Even that one, you can’t call it the gender equal capital. And a very basic way to measure that is to look at the fact that the capitals are the city of government, right? So one very simple way is to look at, well, are women represented in government? Then, since this is the seat of government, let’s look at institutions. And we don’t have equal representation here in Australia. So right there you can see that the city is not built for women, so to speak. And then if we start looking at inequality, say, in housing affordability, access to housing, access to decent quality housing, then certainly there isn’t, there isn’t any gender equality there.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I want to probe into this a little more, because you said, for example, in Canberra, it’s not a gender equitable city, because the representation in the government does not equate to the kind of equal representation a government might need. For example, if I were to extrapolate that, and if you were to broadly look at cities in general, beyond governments and because the premise of the book focuses on looking at feminist capitals, for example, how do you really start looking at these capital cities as feminist cities, if you were to bring in gender Studies or feminist theories, how does one read capital cities through a gender lens?

Dorina Pojani
There are different ways to look at it. One of my approaches is to not prescribe specific shapes, because I feel like once you start prescribing actual shapes, then things start to become oppressive, rather than right. If it’s one particular design of me or whoever that Bucha, that’s, that’s oppressive in itself. So design is to be co creative with people. That’s one thing. But if we want to look at it conceptually, there are, there are a few ways to do it. For example, I don’t want to be a gender essentialist here. But you know how women have traditionally been associated with the caring aspects men attached to the whole ruthless business world and women attached to home and earth, right? And some versions of feminism are all about, okay, making women be more like men, right? Join the hard world of business, kind of get outside the home that that could be, that could be a good, a good goal. But another way to look at it is to say that, well, okay, let’s own the fact that women have been traditionally the more caring sex, and extend that level of care to the whole society. So start treating the whole society the way a good mother would treat her children and her family. And start building our cities based on form, based on that assumption that could be one way to approach it. Another way could be to say that, okay, well, women were always confined to the home, so their physical space was somewhat limited, right? And again, liberal feminists say, Well, the point here is for the women to go, kind of conquer the world the way, the way men have done, and in terms of city space, that translates into sort of limitless city spaces, right? Based on limitless transport infrastructure and sprawl, that’s what we see in contemporary cities. Well, let’s turn that on its head, that kind of worldview, and say, okay, so women had traditionally had more limited spaces, their home, their garden, their neighborhood. Well, that’s not a bad thing, you know, let’s um, let’s start to reconsider the assumption that that’s a bad thing and say, well, small is actually beautiful. We do want human still in our cities, it’s not a bad thing for people to have contact with their neighbors, have their space kind of more limited so that they have a personal relationship with their surroundings, as opposed to living in completely alienating cities where you don’t get to ever see the city limit, right, and you have no idea who your fellow citizens are, nor do you care. So that could be, that could be another way to look at cities from a feminist perspective, small is beautiful. Why not? Let’s own it.

Vaissnavi Shukl
And since Dorina, when you look at cities, a larger chunk of city, of course, there’s multiple components, right? So there’s, of course, infrastructures of governance, there’s transportation, a large part of it is also housing, which is simple human basic need, and yet it offer you like sometimes housing is designed without real care for the people living in it, especially now in larger cities where you don’t have multiple typologies of housing you in general, In like high density cities would have high rise building with a multi family, very dense, packed housing in your world view, when you’re looking at a feminist capital for example, how would the housing policies be different? Could you probably housing become a space where you extend the care that you do at a larger city level and community, rather than just offer housing as a commodity in the market. What’s your take on that?

Dorina Pojani
Well, absolutely, that is so very important. I mean, housing is a major, major feminist issue, and unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot of writing treating housing as a feminist issue. There is more on transport, gender and transport than there is gender, right? So that’s something that I’ve been wanting to explore more in my own research after, after the publication of ‘Trophy Cities’. So some other work that I’ve been doing is looking at the history of cities, the original ideas that shaped urban planning in the 19th century, early 20th century, those utopian visions. And I’ve come to realize that that was the first time in history, actually, so the Second Industrial Revolution era, the first time in history where transport space became more important than residential space. For most of history, housing had been sort of the generating aspect of cities housing and maybe public space. And then later, once these male figures, engineers took over city planning, that’s when we started to focus on transport infrastructure. So in a sense, planning needs to go back to its roots and focus on housing a whole lot more and unfortunately, just like you say in new capital and regular cities, not even capital, just even smaller cities, we’re seeing housing becoming more and more a commercial commodity. We’re moving away from the idea that housing is a space for living, and we’re treating it as an investment, oftentimes, and that kind of way of doing we need to, we need to eliminate in the feminist city. Go back to the idea that housing is a space for living, just for the family or the person that lives there, right there and then. It’s not the way to showcase wealth. It’s not the way to accumulate wealth. It’s not, should not be a way to down generations, because now that’s what we’re seeing. Wealth being passed from generation to generation, not necessarily in the form of cash, but property, realist pay property, and that’s what inventions inequality. I mean, if we continue down that path, we will turn back the clock and we’ll go back to a few times where we were transferred, transferred over to children, and then it was imposter through the social hierarchy.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Last question during now, you just had the book come out, and it’s a wonderful kind of in depth study, but also a commentary on, you know, what new cities are doing, how they’re designed, and a feminist perspective on all these new capitals, what is next for you, and where does it journey take you from here?

Dorina Pojani
Thank you. Thank you for your kind words. Well, I’m following up, like I said, with another book, which should come out in late 2024-early 2025 and that will discuss ‘early utopia’, so second industrial revolution, the kind of planning thinking around that with this one I’m doing with a few colleagues here at the University of Queensland in Australia, and we’re looking at 20 male planners from that early era. They’re located on both sides of the North Atlantic. That’s the region that sort of set the tone for the kind of planning that followed. A lot of the models invented in this region. They were transferred to other parts of the world I am either by acquisition or via intentional learning or various forms of coercion, but that’s where the tone was right. So we’re looking at 20 male planners and seeing what they’re thinking around cities, around cities of the future at the time. And we’re contrasting their work with the work of a few females, I wouldn’t call them planners, but thinkers, elite women, educated women that were concerned about cities. There were a lot fewer women actively planning at the time that there were men, of course, for obvious reasons, women had no or very little access to education. There were some and we show in the book how the patients of the women were very, very distinct patients of the men. So the men were worried about grand city spaces, boulevards, large infrastructures, or even where they advocated for small towns like the ‘Garden City’ was a classic example, right? But the idea was to get the city to have sort of limits. No, not be not be limited. But even those models were just extremely patriarchal, and that’s what we explore in the book. Whereas women had a different approach. Women were looking at cities from the perspective of care, even back then, looking at how migrants were adjusting to New Zealand international migrants, in the case of North America or rural to urban migrants in the case of Europe. So how do we provide housing? How do we make sure that people are fed, and so on. So that’s a very interesting comparison, and shows the contrast between masculine and feminine planning from the very beginning. Not that I want to pitch men against women. That’s not my intention there, but I do critique the fact that or the focus of these early of these early plans, because they did set societies on a certain path, and able to break that path, even in the twentieth century.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So, essentially, the comparative study of the different perspectives of worldview with which these individuals came in together to look at planning and how that differs based on one’s gender. If I were to sum it up.

Dorina Pojani
Yes, yes. Exactly. How can planning be direct, direct development, but without being paternalistic or patronizing to the citizenry?

Vaissnavi Shukl
Sounds wonderful, Dorina, we’ll look forward to that book. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your work. It’s been such a pleasure.

Dorina Pojani
Thanks for having me.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support and Kahan Shah for the background score. You can follow us on Instagram at archoffcentre and reach out to us through our website, archoffcentre.com. And thanks for listening.