Women and the Urban: Synergies between SDG 5 and SDG 11

The year 2015 marked the cusp of a watershed in global development goals on cities and women. The post-MDG era has a new global partnership based on the SDGs, including stand-alone goals on gender equality (SDG 5: 'Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls') and, for the first time ever, a global goal in relation to cities (SDG 11: 'Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable'). Furthermore, Habitat III's New Urban Agenda may determine how cities will be analytically located in relation to the SDGs and has the potential to change how urban issues are understood and acted upon by national and international policy bodies. The contours of 21st century urbanization will be defined not only by these new development goals and agenda, but also by the increasingly unregulated nature of capital and post-financial crisis (2007) economic growth, which is further exacerbating inequality, with a particular impact on women. And yet, little policy attention is paid to how women experience urban life differently from men, how increasing inequality is disproportionately effecting women living in poverty, or to women's rights to the city.

In this session, organized by members of the global research project 'Urbanization, gender and the global south' (GenUrb) and UN-Habitat Gender Hub, we address the changing relationship between urbanization, women's everyday lives, and global urban policy by examining the nature of the intersections between SDG 5 and SDG 11. Short presentations will enable discussion about: i) the synergies between these SDGs, exploring how these synergies relate to women's everyday lives in cities and to the indicators associated with these SDGs; and ii) how academic knowledge production can speak to policy in order to ensure that the needs of women living in poverty and their rights to the city are addressed.