Feminist futures - automated environments

Join us as we celebrate International Women’s Day with a panel discussion exploring how architecture can help to create inclusive, liveable, and socially aware cities that embrace the full gender spectrum in an age of robotisation.

The effects of automation are rarely limited to economics or issues around the division of labour. Changes to production and the service industries that are a result of increased automation are actively shaping our cities and how we interact with them. Architecture’s engagement with the futures that come with these processes are manifold and embrace both the positive and negative potential of automation. From additional leisure time and a focus on individual agency and creativity, to dystopian visions where unemployment and inequality run rampant, it is without question that the built environment can affect the shape of things to come.

Automated environments may have eliminated certain gender associations ascribed to specific jobs, but they have also reinforced gender roles and inequalities. Technology and the direction it takes is influenced by prevalent social tensions and disparity; as such, if we are to reduce inequality and gender stereotyping, we must aim to avoid replicating existing pernicious social dynamics and, instead, unearth architecture’s potential to facilitate change. Can architecture and the design of spaces allow both men and women, humans and non-humans, to express their full potential and provide a working alternative to the status quo?

Join us as we discuss whether automation can lead to a feminist utopia and, if it does, what those spaces might look like.