We loved a new article in YES! Magazine this week about Volksentscheid Berlin AutoFrei, an inspiring grassroots organization in Germany.
Titled Looking to Women to Shape the Future of Berlin’s Transportation, the article discusses the movement in Germany to bring a lens of gender to matters of transportation and urban planning.
“The Autofrei initiative argues that reduced car travel would lead to increased safety, better health, greater climate protection, and all-around higher quality of life in Berlin,” the article’s author Laura Frances Goodfield explains.
Gender researcher and historian Hannah Lotte Lund says in the article: “Gender and urban space is something that is way less discussed here in Germany, so raising awareness would be very helpful.”
There’s a ton of great perspectives here. For example:
“Gender also shows up in spatial patterns of travel around the city. Those who identify as women in Germany are disproportionately responsible for unpaid care work, including for elderly family members. The burden of running errands—grocery shopping, bringing children to school, etc.—often falls on their shoulders, too. So while men are more likely to travel in the form of one long trip, from home to work, women are more likely to combine multiple, shorter trips to run errands en route—like day care drop-off, dry cleaning pickup, groceries, or pharmacy runs—and they more often use public transportation to accomplish these tasks.”
Sunflower Editor Sabina Pariser says she really saw her life reflected in the article’s analysis of urban life and transportation. It shined a light on everyday gender inequities that are too rarely discussed. It also offered a lot of good solutions to make transportation more equitable not just for women but also for people who experience limited mobility.
I loved the article because it felt like an intersection of prioritizing social justice and capturing uniquely nuanced and useful insights on climate by doing so.
Related: Our partner Cultural Survival just published an issue of their quarterly magazine on Decolonizing Gender. Check it out!
What else have you seen about the intersection of gender, transportation, and climate? We’d love your help discovering other related great resources.
As a woman, reading this article in YES! Magazine about the Volksentscheid Berlin AutoFrei movement was incredibly empowering. It was enlightening to see the ways in which gender and urban planning intersect and how often these issues are overlooked. The article provided valuable insights on how reduced car travel can lead to increased safety, better health, greater climate protection, and a higher quality of life for all. It was also interesting to see the specific ways in which women’s unpaid social reproductive work and responsibilities often affect their travel patterns. This made me feel seen and understood, and I am grateful for the solutions offered to make transportation more equitable for all. It is important to continue highlighting and addressing these everyday gender inequities in the transportation and urban planning sectors.
Thanks for saying so, it’s really helpful to hear your specific reactions to some of the specific points in that article! I’m so glad you brought the article to our attention and I enjoyed writing this post with you 🙂 To many more!