Gender and the Built Environment

Urban transportation studies have shown that the ease of accessing urban opportunities in a compact community, characterized with higher density, mixed land uses, and high connectivity, are extremely crucial for urban residents to lead full and active lives. While researchers have also increasingly recognized the differences in travel behavior based on gender and different socioeconomic and ethnic/racial composition, the realities confronted by lower-income, urban minorities, and particularly women, in neighborhoods experiencing disinvestment and decline have been overlooked in most studies. In this context, this study focuses on the Detroit region (SEMCOG), which is recognized as one of the most decentralized and racially segregated metropolitan areas in the U.S. Six neighborhoods in the Detroit region were selected based on socio-demographic and urban built environment characteristics; with two urban Detroit neighborhoods, communities experiencing extreme disinvestment and decline, being compared to four wealthy suburban neighborhoods.
This Ph.D. dissertation explores the linkage between specific urban built environment characteristics and individual travel behavior, in order to identify the neighborhood typologies defining neighborhood-level differences in travel patterns. The analysis also examines gender differences in travel behavior after controlling for urban built environment, socioeconomic and demographic factors. Two main datasets were used for this dissertation: (1) built environment data from field surveys and inventories; and (2) individual or household travel data from a mail survey.
First, the results from the multivariate regression analysis, using 1,106 road network buffers (RNBs), confirmed the positive effects of RNBs that maintained a greater density, diverse land uses, highly connected road networks and more bus stops in promoting non-motorized travel while reducing motorized travel. Next, three neighborhood typologies—the higher density urban Detroit neighborhood group, the higher density suburban neighborhood group, and the lower density suburban neighborhood group—were defined for the within neighborhood analysis. In addition to the significant effects of income and personal vehicle access to a person’s travel pattern that were revealed from the OLS regression analysis, the discriminant analysis differentiated urban Detroit neighborhoods by their lower socioeconomic characteristics, by poor neighborhood environment quality for pedestrian activities and by their pedestrian dominant travel patterns. Lastly, the results from the OLS regression and Analysis of Covariance showed that the traditional gender role was still reflected in women’s daily travel in the Detroit region in that women traveled more frequently and longer distances for household responsibilities, and married women traveled to shop more frequently and longer distances than married men across all three neighborhood typologies. The findings also revealed travel burdens of the socially marginalized populations in terms of the extensive travel distances necessary to reach daily destination due to the decentralization of urban amenities in the Detroit region.

The chapter begins with a brief description of socio-ecological changes in the central Andes between 1985 and 2005, a period marked by troubling developments among silvopastoral areas and women residents. Then, arguing that the conditions and positions of women and forests within their communities do not tell the whole gender story, the analysis expands to consider men and to broaden the spatiotemporal frame. Attention to hierarchies of power and value among differently positioned masculinities reveals that the grueling labor conditions and unfair exchanges to which men community members submit in both product and labor markets are socially constituted and symbolically justified via intersections of gender, spatial and ethnoracial systems that attribute lower value to rural indigenous masculinities relative to more privileged masculine identities. The chapter makes a case for more integral approaches to gender and forestry in order to support efforts to forge socio-ecological systems that may be more satisfying and sustainable for more people and places.