[sustran] Re: Urban Poverty and Transport

Jeff Turner mfksjmt at fs1.ar.man.ac.uk
Mon Nov 24 09:48:32 JST 1997


Dear Sustran Network colleagues,

Sorry for the previous failed attempt to send the paper!!!
 
To add to Brian Williams' and John Howe's summary on the discussions
that were had on Transport and Poverty at the UN International Forum
on Urban Poverty in Florence; I thought it would interest Sustran
members to see one of the papers that were presented at Florence.
Attached is a paper on Gender, Poverty and Transport, presented
within Transport Theme 2 by myself and Margaret Grieco. We would 
welcome any comments you have but please address them to the 
Sustran network as a whole.

Best wishes

Jeff Turner
Research Fellow
Dept. of Planning & Landscape
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester
M13 9PL

Tel +44 161 275 6948
Fax +44 161 275 6935
E-mail Jeff.Turner at man.ac.uk

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Presentation notes of talk delivered at the UN  International  Forum
on Urban Poverty (HABITAT), `Governance and participation: practical
approaches to urban poverty reduction. Towards cities for the new
generation', Florence, November, 1997


GENDER, POVERTY AND TRANSPORT: 
A CALL FOR POLICY ATTENTION.  

Margaret Grieco, 
Professor-elect of Organisation and Development Management,
University of North London 

and 

Jeff Turner, 
Research Fellow, 
Department of Planning, 
University of Manchester.

1.  A wake up call on gender, poverty and transport:  the need for
gender analysis and the development of gender methodologies.

Both separately and jointly, we have worked for a time on the
relationships which hold between gender, transport and poverty (Turner
and Fouracre, 1995; Grieco, 1995, 1996; Grieco, Pickup and Whipp,
1989; Grieco, Apt and Turner, 1996) both within the developing and the
developed world.  Across the body of our research, it has become clear
to us that women's greater domestic responsibilities coupled with
their weaker access to household resources have significant
consequences for their transport and travel status. The lower the
income of a household the more probable it is that women will
experience greater transport deprivation as compared to men. 
Transport deprivation may take the form of women's use of inferior
modes of transport as compared with men; it may take the form of
women's journeys having multiple purposes and thus generating greater
anxiety in the travel context; it may take the form of customary or
legal constraints on women's right to travel or to use a particular
transport mode.

Despite the now almost universal recognition that women's domestic
load, often in combination with low paid or unpaid work, leaves women
both time poor and resource poor, the implications of this situation
for transport and travel have largely gone unconsidered and
unremarked.  Development projects all too frequently accept the
immobility of women as a natural and unchangeable social state which
simply explains the low level of women's participation in project
planning and design even within communal or popular planning modes. 
The possibility of bringing participative forms to where women are to
be found rarely receives adequate attention and projects which attempt
to move the boundaries and constraints around women's access to
transport and travel are few and far between.  Developing
women-friendly transport and travel services has, with a few notable
exceptions, generally held a low priority status in policy makers
thinking both in the developed and developing world.  Yet any attempt
to tackle poverty systematically must, given the social composition of
the poor, tackle gender disparities in access to opportunities and
resources and a critical factor,in its turn,  determining gender
opportunities and resources  is the spatial distribution of those
opportunities and resources and the access to transport and travel to
reach them. 

This may seem a simple argument but in the present, new hospitals get
built without any gender analysis of accessibilities.  Indeed, as a
profession transport planners have failed to produce systematic
methodologies which incorporate gender analysis for the purpose of
urban development and planning.  At present, it would be fair to argue
that  there are no systematic gender inclusion procedures for
transport either in terms of the training of professionals, the
participation of users or the design and planning of systems, services
and equipment.  Yet new informatic technologies are available which
readily permit the capture and harnessing of gender data for transport
and travel systems which better service women and most particularly
the low income woman.  Instead of standing waiting with children at
poorly serviced and poorly supervised unsafe busstops, low income
women could through new technology call demand responsive services to
get them to hospitals in time with efficiency benefits for the overall
urban system.  Only because we do not cost for women's wasted time
travelling to overcentralised urban facilities  or because we do not
cost for the imposition of poor health on those who are discouraged by
the epic quality of low income transport journeys do we arrive at
costings which favour large hospitals on the periphery of urban space,
hospitals which rarely have any customised transport to service
routine low income needs. 

New informatic technologies give us new ways to think about how we
tackle urban poverty.  They provide us with a greater ability to
precisely target the needs of the most needy and to service them
responsively at a minimal administrative cost.  But to take full
advantage of this new set of opportunities we have to develop a new
approach to social policy thinking which has gender at its core. 
Gender analysis and gender methodologies have to move from the
activities of marginal policy activists to mainstream professional
practice.  Let's just conduct a test in this room: any person who
represents an agency which systematically makes use of a gender
methodology in respect of poverty or transport or any form of service
provision or planning procedure please raise your hand.  Let's take
this opportunity of seeing how deep this procedure cuts: is it
participative, were the users asked about their preferences, what use
is made of the data collected, what changes has it resulted in (When 
we asked this question to transport experts in Florence no one 
answered in the affirmative). 

When writing these notes we guessed that the answer to our question
was probably in the negative ball park rather than up there on the
cutting edge of urban poverty.  The consequence of few people in this
field is that argument must remain for the moment more at the level of
advocacy than research.  But this is the wake up call: it is time to
put gendered analysis and methodologies in place both within the
developing and the developed world and it is the time to harness the
instruments of the new millenium to this agenda.  The development of
gender responsive transport systems which service the needs of low
income women and alleviate their poverty and the health and travel
anxieties which attend that poverty is our goal.

2.  Some simple examples of the gender, poverty, transport
interaction.

As we know, planners behave as if transport has no specific gender
features but the evidence from research is that there are indeed
specific features.

Three examples make the point very clearly: 

1) Studies of male and female trip making in developed countries
indicate that women are more likely to be involved in trip chaining.
Their heavy domestic schedules mean that they have different travel
patterns to men: the time poverty of women shows in the complexity of
their travel and transport schedules with all the attendant stresses
that result.  The poorer the woman, the more complex her travel and
transport schedule as she has less ability to buy in help.  

2) Studies of low income household survival strategies in developed
countries and developing countries have shown the extent to which
women are involved in the heavy exchange of time favours in order to
meet their domestic survival and travel needs.  Female trip making in
low income contexts often requires major exercises of coordination
with others, frequently outside of the household.  

3) In Africa, women and girls are a major transport form, headloading
goods from field to market and from market to other venues,
transporting water from well to hearth.  Both in rural and urban areas
women are a major source of transport both for their households and
for purchasers of their services.

What are the transport policy implications of these three simple
differences?  In the first case, it may be more difficult to move
women out of the family car than it is men as they are the household
agent with the most tasks to accomplish within the tightest time
schedules.  To move women out of family cars may mean designing whole
sets of infrastructural facilities differently so that many functions
can reliably be performed in the same space and within a reliable time
frame. Setting up such reliabilities through the use of new transport
informatics and more responsive transport sytems clearly requires
considerable policy thinking if we commence from this simple gender
analysis.

In the second case, currently there is a major discussion of
difficulties in the british national health system caused by missed
appointments and an expressed policy intention to curb this practice. 
But the evidence is that women are often the victims of time and
transport circumstances which cause them to miss their appointments at
cost to their own health.  Indeed, the anxiety generated by attempting
to gain time for their own health needs causes many low income women
to simply suffer rather than attend to their own well being. 
Determining why appointments are missed and putting transport and
child care services in place in response to the understanding that
women's commitments and low level of resources work against their
ability to keep appointments is the more progressive policy direction.
 Requiring low income women to honour health service contracts that
have punctual attendance as a bottom line without providing the
resources which enable them to meet these contracts will have the
result of pushing low income women into further poor health. 
Similarly, bringing health facilities into local areas rather than
centralising them enables women to take up health services - this is a
major issue in health provision in developing countries at present.

In the third case,  the exclusion of women from participation in
transport system and service design results in their specific
transport needs being ignored.  Head load carrying is damaging to
health and there are low cost measures which could be taken
immediately to reduce this health burden on women.  Animal traction,
wheeled or rolling devices can be used to take the load off the head
at relatively low cost but instead attention has gone on developing
road networks independently of whether these are indeed performing a
useful local economic function or are maintainable.  Indeed roads are
often built under the legitimating banner that they will be good for
women and result in the movement of loads from human transport onto
motorised vehicles.  The evaluations which show that this is not what
happens are rarely undertaken and the myth persists.  Appropriate
gender representation in user groups  would go some way to repairing
this dangerous process of transport myth production.

3. Professionalising the relevance of gender in urban poverty and
urban transport programmes: programming in grassroots gender
participation.

What can be done?   In order to bring about a reduction in urban
poverty, we must pay attention to the specific gender aspects of the
poverty trap.  Currently, within the western world there is a fairly
strong policy wind blowing in the direction of reducing the dependence
of single mothers on the welfare state.  Within this debate, we hear
much about the need to ensure that these `dependent' citizens should
be brought very strongly into the world of work but at present nobody
is discussing the household scheduling difficulties that single
mothers will experience in terms of  balancing work and child care
commitments in the context of their inferior access to transport,
amongst other resources.   We need protocols in transport policy and
planning which explicitly address the gender dimension :

1) in terms of researching how gender plays out in the interaction
with transport and travel system  

2) in terms of ensuring that sensitisation to gender is part of the
professional training process 

3) in terms of ensuring adequate gender representation within the
profession and 

4) in terms of ensuring adequate gender representation within user
groups.

We also need a more active urban polity signalling its transport needs
and preferences to policy makers.  New informatic technology will
allow users to signal their needs and preferences to the transport
`experts' in a way that has never previously been possible.  Transport
operators and policy makers can open up their organisations to high
quality electronic feedback from users.  The same technologies which
allow the new hi-tech organisation of road based transport can support
with little administrative cost gender electronic lobbies signalling
their needs.  It is a development we should start to expect: already
within the United States, older persons have discovered the power of
new informatic technologies in signalling their needs as a category of
users to a host of services.  The gender dimensions of poverty, and
indeed of ageing, will surely in time generate a lobby for responsive
transport services: it would be healthy if the profession moved to
meet the new analytic, methodological and policy opportunities
provided by the conjunction of gendered transport disadvantage and the
evolution of technologies which can overcome it before the nascent
technologies proceed to far along the old patriarchal pathways.

References:

Grieco, M. (1995) Time pressures and low income families: the
implications for social transport policy in Europe', Community
Development Journal

Grieco, M. (1996) Workers' dilemmas: recruitment, reliability and
repeated exchange.  Routledge: London

Grieco, M., Apt, N. and Turner, J. At Christmas and on rainy days:
transport, travel and the female traders of Accra.  Avebury: Aldershot

Grieco, M., Pickup, L. and Whipp, R. (eds)(1989) Gender, transport and
employment.  Gower: Aldershot

Turner, J. and Fouracre, P. (1995) Women and transport in developing
countries, Transport Reviews

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