Being Able to Exist in the City In Defiance of Planning: An Examination on a Woman-Friendly City in Izmir - Konak

Today, the world is discussing gender mainstreaming. Solutions to ensure women's equality are being sought to address male social, economic, cultural, and spatial sovereignty. However, although primary texts including treatises and legislation advocating the equal rights and freedoms of men and women have recently been composed by experts around in the world in fields such as criminal and civil law and occupational safety, or something to this effect (e.g., the European Convention on Human Rights and the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women), sufficient provision for gender mainstreaming in the context of transformations arising from socio-cultural structure have not yet been made. This is also the situation in Turkey, where women cannot experience gender mainstreaming due to social gender roles. However, since urban planning literally builds the future drawing upon social values, it has been unable to modify cities according to women's needs and priorities. Accordingly, this paper discusses how urban planning ignores women and explains how this issue can be addressed utilizing the Women-friendly Cities Program, which is a type of objection to this patriarchal structure. This paper then analyzes whether Konak, the central town in Izmir (known to be a "women-friendly" city), is truly women-friendly by performing a field study in one of Konak's most-used areas. In other words, this paper reveals the fact that urban spaces ignore women while explaining the spatial provisions of the "women-friendly" city as well as ways in which urban planning negatively affects women