From equal opportunities to gender awareness in strategic spatial planning. Reflections based on Swedish experiences.

The Swedish government aims to mainstream the policy of equal opportunities into all policy areas, including spatial planning. This paper draws on the key findings of a research project on good planning practice, based on a survey and in-depth interviews, to investigate achievements and good examples in this area. The good examples turned out to be few and instead a number of shortcomings were found. This can be partly explained by the inherent limitations of the concept of equal opportunities. The aim of the paper is, therefore, to demonstrate why and how an alternative approach, based on a combination of feminist theory and planning theory, must and can be developed to mainstream equal opportunities into spatial planning