On a sunny afternoon this spring, Eva Kail stood outside the gleaming subway station in Aspern Seestadt, a sprawling planned community in northeast Vienna that she essentially manifested from an idea into a real place.
Ms. Kail, a pioneering urban planner who has shaped life in Austria’s capital for three decades, was waiting to take a reporter on a tour of this unfinished “city within a city.” About 12,000 people live here today, with another 14,000 expected in the next decade, making Aspern Seestadt one of the largest urban development projects in Europe.
“There was nothing here before,” said Ms. Kail, silver-haired and energetic at 65. “It was an old, unused airfield. There was a chance to have an impact from the very beginning and to have a large practical stage to work on.”
Aspern Seestadt embodies the philosophy that has underpinned much of her work going back to the 1990s, all the way up to her retirement in March: “gender mainstreaming,” with the goal of embedding gender equality into infrastructure, legislation, budgets and beyond. So while this community promises “something for everyone”— homes for sale or rent, offices, health care facilities, green spaces, public transportation, schools and nurseries — a central mission becomes clear as one looks a bit closer.
As the brochure proclaims, “Seestadt has a female face.”
All of the streets and plazas here are named for women — Janis Joplin Promenade, Hannah Arendt Platz and Ada Lovelace Strasse, to name a few. But Ms. Kail pointed to plenty more examples of the gender-conscious urban planning that she spent 30 years researching and implementing in Vienna: wider sidewalks for strollers, safer parks with more benches for resting, more services and amenities within walking distance.
Are these things inherently gender related? Historically yes, since women tend to be more responsible for child care and often spend more time at home or without the use of a family car. In Austria, a survey last year found that women perform two-thirds of child care and spend about two more hours each day doing unpaid labor like housework. The United States isn’t much different: In 2023, women did 50 percent more child care and about 30 percent more housework, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”
Ms. Kail got her start in 1991, when she helped organize a photo exhibition called “Who Owns the Public Space: Women’s Everyday Life in the City,” which shone a light on eight local women and girls. It was a hit, sparking conversation about how cities were neglecting half of the population. Ms. Kail soon found herself in charge of Vienna’s first Frauenburo (“women’s office”).
“When we started with this exhibition, where we criticized quite a lot about ignorant ‘malestream’ planning, we wouldn’t have dreamed of this,” she said, referring to Aspern Seestadt.
By the mid ’90s, gender mainstreaming was gaining momentum around the world, including at the United Nations, which adopted it as a global strategy for gender equality in 1995. And Vienna was its epicenter.
“It was in Vienna that they really started examining, in the ’90s, who’s using the space and who’s missing,” said Mary Dellenbaugh-Losse, a U.S.-born, Berlin-based urban researcher, consultant and author focusing on social inclusion, participation and gender. “You have to be looking for that problem to be able to find it.”
People tend to assume that a city’s design and construction are essentially gender-neutral. But feminist urban-planning scholars maintain that modern cities and suburbs were designed primarily by men, with men in mind. And not just any men — middle-class white men who drove to work in the morning and returned home in the evening. There was little infrastructure to serve other citizens.
“In practice, planners are not taking into account that women and girls have been systematically disadvantaged, and sometimes you need policies and services and amenities that help to make up for that,” said Leslie Kern, an associate professor of geography and environment at Mount Allison University and the author of “Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World.”
Ms. Kail said her job was to stir this idea into Vienna’s development mix at the turn of the century. “I was always asking and re-asking if things have to be the way they are,” she said. For example, she wondered, could an apartment building be constructed with the goal of specifically serving women?
In 1997, she unveiled Frauen-Werk-Stadt (Women-Work-City), a 357-unit apartment complex designed by four female architects to address what they felt were the needs of women at the time. The results — for example, that storage rooms for strollers and bikes, as well as laundry rooms, should be spacious and well-lit; that stairwells should have natural lighting; and that large buildings should have playgrounds — eventually became part of the assessment criteria that Vienna uses to choose which housing projects to invest in.
In follow-up surveys, the majority of residents in Frauen-Werk-Stadt and other living complexes designed for women expressed high satisfaction with the way the building’s design supported them in everyday life.
As the years passed, Ms. Kail helped improve Vienna’s streetlights to make neighborhoods safer. She fought for smoothing and widening sidewalks for better accessibility for strollers. She pushed for rooms in public housing projects that were larger and mutable enough to accommodate growing families. She ensured that public transport — especially for those not commuting to an office — was well-connected and punctual.
She also helped develop gender-sensitive innovations for parks and gardens, including footpaths that crisscross a park and circle it, creating more options for traversing the space and encouraging visibility.
“We are not big fans of bushes,” said Dr. Julia Girardi-Hoog, who has replaced Ms. Kail as the chief gender planner for the city of Vienna. “Trees are much better because they provide shade and you can see through them.”
Dr. Girardi-Hoog researched Ms. Kail’s work as part of her Ph.D. on gendered office spaces 20 years ago. More recently, they began working together. “Eva was always super motivated,” she said. She never tired of reexplaining to various city employees why it is important to apply a gender lens.”
Now, decades’ worth of ideas are being synthesized in Aspern Seestadt, where slightly more than half the residents are female. Most services are easy to reach by foot, bus or bike (bike rentals are free here), a level of accessibility that feminists have promoted for decades, Ms. Kail said, under the term “city of short distances.” A services hub with a medical center, grocery store, bank, cafe and stationary shop is a five-minute bus ride from the subway station. Even closer is the 12-acre artificial lake and surrounding park. The theory is that short distances make running errands and dropping off or picking up children more efficient, lightening the load for care workers.
“The time for doing these tasks can add up,” said Anna Nagy-Staron, 40, a data scientist who moved to Seestadt in 2015 and lives there with her husband and two children. Having everything within walking distance allows her to maintain a full-time job without sacrificing too much of her family life.
“From the perspective of someone caring for small children, it’s great,” Ms. Nagy-Staron said. She and her husband sometimes discuss moving to another part of Vienna, but the thought of losing these conveniences stops them: “The time has to come from somewhere.”
Another striking aspect of life in Aspern Seestadt is its lack of cars — only a third of the streets allow them. Beyond sustainability goals, it means improved accessibility to services for people with fewer resources — especially women, who are paid less than men on average, and who are more likely to work part-time and use public transportation, according to many studies.
“There’s a pedestrian zone next to our building,” said Anja Alexandrova, 39, a pharmacist who moved to Seestadt in 2022 with her husband and toddler. “My son was able to ride his bike here when he was 2. That never would have happened in the city center.”
Ms. Alexandrova thinks of Seestadt as a little city connected to a big city. “I think it’s totally safe,” she said. “If anything would happen on the street, the willingness of residents to help if they heard it, immediately 10 flats would probably call the police.”
As for those street names, “it makes you Google people,” she said. “Many of them I didn’t know before.”
But while these improvements have been aimed primarily at helping women, skeptics have long argued that gender mainstreaming fails to tackle inequality at its root, and worse, perpetuates outmoded stereotypes.
“The original approach to gender mainstreaming tended to lean into the observed patterns of use and assumed gender-based needs that were built on earlier assumptions of gender roles,” said Jennifer Gardner, a designer and urbanist based in Washington D.C.
As the concepts of gender and gender roles evolved into the 21st century, Ms. Kail tried to expand the mission to support residents of any gender who care for children, older people or those with disabilities, and who run errands throughout the day. “You can’t change the imbalance of care work,” she said, “but you can make it more visible, show its value to society and make it a topic that people are concerned about.”
When feminist urban planning started in the 1970s and ’80s, said Dr. Dellenbaugh-Losse, the development consultant, “it was about cis-women, hetero women, white women.” Now, there is more “understanding of how gender intersects with race, social class, ability and other categories of discrimination, and how that experience changes your access to power, space, and your ability to pay for an alternate option in the marketplace.”
Ms. Kail acknowledges that the parameters of gender mainstreaming are in flux. Where there used to be “a focus on the everyday life of white, middle-class women and their children,” she said, over the past decade or so a new crop of urban planners has widened the lens, just as she’s stepping out of it.
“There’s a new generation that’s really interested in this topic, specifically in gender planning issues,” she said. “But they are defining it more largely, as a holistic, socially sensitive approach. This feels quite good, but it’s also a bit of a pity now, to feel the new energy and not be part of it.”