In Design, the IWD Slogan #ChooseToChallenge Means Fighting for Stronger Community Living

UN Women reports that the average woman now spends nearly the equivalent of a full-time job on unpaid childcare – for comparison, that’s one full working day a week more than the average man. It’s also been shown that in many households, if anyone has to cut back on paid work, it usually defaults to the person who earns least. With a gender pay gap that precedes the pandemic, this is once again bad news for women.

But unpaid domestic work is only one part of a cluster of problems facing women in Covid-19. Women have also been recorded as experiencing greater anxiety than men during the pandemic – bearing an emotional and financial fallout that has all-encompassing effects on their livelihoods.

The problems extend beyond the home and into our neighbourhoods. During Covid-19, sexual harassment and other forms of violence towards women have continued to occur on streets, in parks, and on transport. Social distancing and curfews have meant less people are outside, resulting in increased susceptibility and risk of violent incidents.

What has all this got to do with design? Pretty much everything.

People’s behaviours are reinforced by the physical world around them. Therefore, the places, architecture, infrastructure and public realm that supports our lifestyles must now accommodate a widening gulf between how genders can adapt to an altered world. It needs to enable greater equity, ensuring women do not get left behind because of societal forces that are far beyond their control.

In practical terms, this means that the way we design has to support a new way of living. One that allows women to share the burden of domestic care, that helps them feel safe in public spaces, and that helps to reduce the emotional toll of living in crisis mode.

dRMM has always placed social usefulness at the forefront of its design agenda. This means creating places that directly serve the people that use them as a driving principle. We value this above aesthetics. Our aim now, along with our peers and collaborators, must be to understand how this translates to post-Covid communities.

The key word here is community. Going forward, places must be designed with an aim to strengthen collective support as a priority. This means following a design formula that empowers and improves wellbeing for all – men, women, children, retirees, self-employed, unemployed; people of every race, income bracket and physical ability. Everyone deserves to live in a place built to provide mutual support and wellbeing – this is the best way we can alleviate the disparities that have tangibly impacted women over the past year, and well before that.

So what makes good community spaces? I set up the Quality of Life Foundation two years ago precisely to answer this question, interrogating explicitly how to design wellbeing into the places we live. We have recently launched a framework outlining six overriding themes identified as crucial to building better quality of life: Control, Health, Nature, Movement, Wonder and Belonging. Our framework provides evidence around what and how each theme contributes to an enhanced way of living, suggesting what communities, developers, designers and local authorities might do to encourage better places to live.

Designing for better communities automatically means designing better support for women. If the elderly are given the opportunity to live in age-friendly places, women will benefit from the added support their presence can bring. If children are provided with safer, nature-infused places to run and play in, women will benefit from peace of mind that their children are healthy and happy. If streets are well-lit, pedestrianised and support passive surveillance, women will benefit from feeling safer. If housing is designed with adequate open space for exercise and meditation, women will benefit from improved mental health and feel better armoured to cope with life’s anxieties. Anything that design can do to strengthen the health of communities impacts women in a positive way.

I know this first-hand, having grown up on a commune where childcare responsibility was shared and where intergenerational living was the norm. The value I gained from strong community support has trickled down to the work I do today. In part, it is also a reason why our studio has always been non-hierarchical and supportive of working culture built on openness. dRMM has always been made up of half or more women on our team. Our sense of community supports this reality.

International Women’s Day’s #ChooseToChallenge slogan is a mandate for all of us. Post-Covid, our challenge must be to design places that benefit and uplift communities as diverse, inclusive and supportive systems. In doing so, we will not only help eliminate the setbacks that women face daily, but we can also dramatically improve quality of life for everyone. It’s a win-win situation.