Reimagining Cape Town as a Feminist City – Women’s Day Webinar
If we could rank cities according to how desirable they are for women to live, work and play in, where would Cape Town rank? What can we do to make Cape Town a better city for women? To celebrate Women’s Day, the Cape Town Museum together with the Gender Equity Unit (GEU), University of the Western Cape, organised a webinar to explore these questions and to reimagine Cape Town as a feminist city. The event featured an inspiring and powerful group of speakers who are passionate about creating a gender-sensitive and safe city where equal opportunities exist for all to thrive and grow.
The webinar was opened by Helene Vollgraaff, manager of the Cape Town Museum, and was facilitated by Maria van Staden from the GEU and Juliana Davids, who manages the Cape Town Futures programme on behalf of the Cape Town Museum. Helene gave some context to the discussion and the work of the Cape Town Museum, which has as its tagline “a future inspired” – highlighting the museum’s focus on reimagining Cape Town for a better future. It was thus fitting to commemorate Women’s Day by exploring this theme with women’s experiences of the city as a focus point.
Laura Robinson, an architect, heritage consultant and Chairperson of the Cape Town Museum Management Committee opened the webinar, giving an international perspective on the creation of feminist cities. She outlined how the need for feminist cities is enshrined in various international policies and programmes such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the United Nations’ Guidelines on Safer Cities. She makes the point that city policies and planning need to be based on women’s and girl’s needs and rights. How we develop public open spaces, parks, playgrounds, pedestrian ways, public transport infrastructure and well-lit safe spaces is key to creating feminist cities. In order to make this happen, we need to ensure that women are part of the teams who design, monitor and make decisions about how our cities are developed.
The first speaker, Ntombi Mbadlanyana, a gender activist working for the Provincial Department of Local Government, takes this point forward and talks about the importance of women in leadership positions. She explains how historically cities were built as an economic hub for men. In order to bring about change and advance women’s interests, she stresses the need for gender representation in senior management and decision-making roles at local government level as this level is closest to the community being served. Women need to be trained and empowered to analyse policies and participate in key decision-making processes in order to effectively advance the interests of women. The discussion raised the point that representation does not necessarily lead to transformation, which is important to consider when working towards more equal representation of women at management level.
In the same way that as we need more women in decision-making positions, Apiwe Hotele, Technology Commercialisation Specialist at the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO), spoke about the need to have more women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields so that the knowledge production that is feeding into the development of our cities is more in the hands of women. She talked about various programmes she is currently involved in that support young people, especially girls, in science subjects such as the IMBASA Programme and Enlighten-Edu, an online platform that supports learners in maths and science education.
A video of a short theatre piece called Taxi Queen, produced by the GEU theatre group and highlighting the abuse women face on public transport, presented a suitable introduction into the next topic, which was around security, safety and public service in feminist cities. Nomfundo Makhubo, Stakeholder Coordinator at the SARAO/Square Kilometre Array (SKA), works to support the interests of community members by ensuring that their voices are heard by those making decisions. She stressed that creating local economies is an important part of creating a more equal city – distributing economic opportunities not just in the urban centres, but closer to where people live.
Slee Mbhele, Project Coordinator, Division of Human Biology at the University of Cape Town and volunteer firefighter, spoke about her passion to break gender stereotypes that limit women and girls from reaching their potential. For her, gender empowerment is not about making women strong – they are already strong – but about changing the way the world perceives women. It is also about how women and girls perceive their own potential, highlighting the importance of teaching young girls that they can do anything they set their minds to.
Finally, Miranda Pillay, a retired senior lecturer at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), looked at the role of religion and feminist cities. She started her presentation by asking the questions: who is being memorialised in our cities and in our sacred texts? How can we retrieve women’s voices that have been erased from history? She makes the point that feminism remains an “F-word” and explains how women are being dismissed in four ways by being trivialised, spiritualised, particularised, and universalised – a point that resonated with many participants in the webinar. Miranda sees religion as playing an important role in transforming cities as many policymakers and lawmakers in charge of our cities are members of faith communities. Generally, all religions promote values and have the potential to inspire their adherents to advocate for the well-being of all. In conclusion, she recommends that we need to be intentional about listening to what and how women experience previously male-dominated spaces, we need to validate women’s experiences, and also explore alternative practices that will open opportunities for women to access services and resources in a safe, women-friendly environment.
Concluding remarks by the facilitators and Helene Vollgraaff acknowledge that the task of transforming our city may seem like an overwhelming one. Initiatives such as this webinar can, however, start a conversation, help people connect, and act as a spark to take our vision forward. Ideas were welcomed on how to take this conversation forward into the future.