In 1967 my husband, Brian Moser directed a film about the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia for UK Granada TV's series World in Action (1963-1998), with me working alongside him, as an unpaid, non-unionized, member of the film crew. This Viewpoint article recollects my contribution to documenting this history-changing event, how I came to be there, and how my positionality as a wife meant that I was made invisible, or 'invisibilised'. The meant that, despite my participation, I never allowed myself to recognise that this exciting experience, or the subsequent prize-winning film, was mine to 'own'. I use Callan and Ardner's early 1980s feminist concept of the 'incorporated wife' to explore my contradictory positionality, as well as my subsequent long-term admiration for women guerrilla combatants. This started with Brian's photo of Che Guevara, taken before rigor mortis had set in, wearing socks that I thought belonged to Tania, the East German courier, who, caught behind the lines, nursed the asthmatic Guevara, and was soon killed in battle. As I later came to know Colombian women ex-combatants, Tania's socks became symbolic to me of the role so frequently ascribed to them, if not exactly 'incorporated wives', nevertheless still 'invisibilised', and dismissed in guerrilla conflicts, amid the celebration of the heroism of men combatants such as Ernesto Guevarra, nicknamed 'Che'.

The neo-Marxist dependency debates which dominated third world development theory in the 1970s highlighted the limitations of modernization approaches to development, with their rationale that through accelerated growth developing countries would ‘catch up’ with advanced economies. Shifts in attitudes towards the contribution of women to development processes have occurred alongside a marked deterioration in the world economy. Ironically, this has meant that recent international economic policy appears once again to be reinforcing not only the dependency status of third world countries, but within them the dependent status of low-income women. The effects of structural adjustment policies on women's employment has varied, although the lowering of incomes has resulted in increased participation in productive work, whether it be through the feminization of rural agriculture. In many nutrition interventions such as targeted food subsidies and direct feeding for the most vulnerable, it is assumed that women in their community-managing role will take responsibility for the efficient delivery of such services.

This article reflects on my contribution as an urban feminist scholar-gender expert practitioner to Gender and Development (GAD) theory and practice in cities of the South in relation to my changing positionality within specific institutional contexts. My journey started in the 1980s with urban gender planning, conceptualised in the Development Planning Unit, a United Kingdom-based urban planning unit. After a 'diversionary' decade in the World Bank, experiencing GAD non-alignment between individual and institutional positionality, my journey continued as a Ford Foundation external advisor, developing an operational approach to urban gender transformation. As I moved across the feminist scholar-gender expert divide, contextualised within changing GAD debates, I highlight and critique differences and similarities between 'political' and 'technical/instrumental' knowledge production of gender practice, and conclude that it is the cyclical synergies between them has produced the significant changes in GAD theory and practice.

This paper describes the role of intergenerational processes in increasing or reducing multidimensional inequality in Indio Guayas, a low-income peripheral settlement in Guayaquil, Ecuador. It also examines the importance of family social capital, irrespective of spatial location, as against household social capital in these processes. This longitudinal case study included a dataset on trends from 1978 through 1992 to 2004, in-depth studies over the decades, and further comparative research in 2018. The anthropological narrative is provided by the voices of three women and their families over 40 years. In 2018, interviews my son and I undertook for the documentary filmCalle Kdemonstrated the importance of family social capital in the intergenerational reciprocity among mothers, daughters, fathers and sons, while illustrating different intergenerational trajectories addressing the challenges of inequality at this micro-level. The postscript points to the likely critical importance of family social capital in the context of the appalling COVID-19 pandemic.

En estudios de vulnerabilidad al cambio climatico, una limitante importante se relaciona con la incertidumbre de proyecciones climaticas que los gobiernos locales requieren para estimar los riesgos e impactos que eventos climaticos tienen en diferentes areas de la ciudad. La falta de informacion a escala reducida dificulta comparar como las comunidades, los hogares y las pequenas empresas se adaptan a fenomenos meteorologicos extremos y severos. Lo anterior genera desafios a los gobiernos locales y otras instituciones publicas y no gubernamentales para que puedan implementar medidas que aumenten la resiliencia en areas urbanas pobres. El informe se basa en la experiencia del Proyecto ‘Planificacion de Adaptacion de Activos al Cambio Climatico (PACC)’ que muestra como la adaptacion de activos comunitarios contribuye a abordar esta brecha y, al hacerlo, puede integrarse en la planificacion estrategica y operativa de la ciudad. El informe describe el marco conceptual y operativo del enfoque PACC y las distintas fases a traves de las cuales los habitantes de dos barrios populares de Tegucigalpa junto con representantes del Municipio de Tegucigalpa y otros socios locales en un proceso de coproduccion identificaron, negociaron y acordaron soluciones de adaptacion de activos al cambio climatico. Finalmente, proporciona ejemplos de soluciones de adaptacion a climas severos (sequia y lluvia) que fueron legal y tecnicamente factibles, y financiera y socialmente aceptables en los dos barrios: cosecha de agua lluvia y construccion de muros de retencion con llantas usadas.

The 2016 Habitat III conference in Quito provides a challenging opportunity to address widespread, persistent urban gender inequalities through the elaboration of a New Urban Agenda (NUA). To achieve the identified radical paradigm shift calls for critical reflection and clarification of the meaning of gender transformation as against gender mainstreaming, and the elaboration of a conceptual and operational framework that identifies urban pathways not only to empower individual women but also to collectively transform fundamental gender power relations. This paper describes the gender asset accumulation framework as one such approach, and identifies the existing evidence base on urban transformative gendered interventions in land tenure and housing, safety in public spaces, and informal economy activities. In assessing gender-related contributions to the Habitat III process, it highlights a conjuncture in the identification of the same three gender-transformative interventions in the Transformative Commitments section of the Zero Draft NUA. However, these have been diluted in the Revised Zero Draft, which does not create optimism for the final NUA. The paper concludes by suggesting that a potential strategy for the global urban gender networks and multiple voices of civil society and grassroots groups is to reach a consensus on a priority agenda, and post-Quito to collectively contest and negotiate its implementation.

Current research on the impacts of the 2007 global economic crisis on international migration takes two different positions. Some studies emphasize the negative impacts while others are more positive. This article argues that these two positions offer simplistic interpretations which fail to take account of the complex micro-level realities that determine migrant experiences. The article discusses how a small group of migrants from Guayaquil, Ecuador, accumulate and consolidate a complex portfolio of assets both before and during the economic crisis in Spain. Conceptualized in terms of an asset accumulation framework, and based on micro-level longitudinal trend data, rather than the more generally used macro-level snapshots or anecdotal evidence, the study highlights the fact that the formalization of legal status or citizenship is a crucial pre-condition, which sets in motion a virtuous' cycle of consolidation of an interrelated portfolio of assets, regardless of the wider macro-economic environment. Even if this turns into a vicious' cycle, for those losing jobs, to date Spanish welfare benefits have acted as a social protection mechanism.

The purpose of this Working Paper, written to celebrate the DPU’s 60th Anniversary, along with the 30th Anniversary of its gender programme, is to revisit gender planning during this period. It deconstructs different phases; from the ‘invention’ of gender planning in the 1980s, to its widespread ‘diffusion’ as the ‘Moser framework’ in the 1990s, followed by a marked ‘divergence’ between practitioners using the planning framework and feminist theorists critiquing it. By the late 1990s, after the successful Beijing Platform for Action, the paper identifies a ‘convergence’ associated with the wide-scale adoption of gender mainstreaming by most institutions previously using the different gender analysis frameworks. Since then gender practitioners have focused on gender mainstreaming and empowerment, while for feminist academics the dominant paradigm has been ‘gender transformation’. In many respects, the limitations of gender mainstreaming in practice, has meant that gender planning, even if by another name, has come full circle contributing to a practitioner-focused gender framework that creates awareness for new generations, as well as providing associated methodological tools for policy, planning and project formulation and implementation. At each phase, the paper identifies underlying tensions between the political and technical/instrumental; as well as the divorce between theory and practice, as it reflects on both short and long term impact of gender planning over the past 30 years, as feminists and practitioners have responded both to a changing global macro-economic context as well as further developing gender theory and practice. Today there are new challenges; the divorce between theory and practice appears to be greater than ever, with result-based management and evidence-based policy and planning dominating development practice, counterpoised by ‘transformative social relations’ as the dominant theoretical academic gender discourse. This raises the intriguing question, where is gender planning? Gender planning and development: Revisiting, deconstructing and reflecting Caroline O. N. Moser

In studies of climate change vulnerability, an important constraint relates to the uncertainty of the climate projections that local governments need to estimate precisely the risks and impacts climate events have on different parts of a city. In addition, the lack of “downscaled”, or local, climate information makes it very difficult to compare how individual communities and households adapt to severe and extreme weather events and, more importantly, what actions local governments can carry out to increase resilience in poor urban areas. Based on a conceptual and operational framework developed in recent years by the authors in collaboration with partners in the global South, this paper illustrates how “bottom-up” community asset planning for climate change adaptation can help to address this gap and be mainstreamed into “top-down” citywide strategic and operational planning. The paper describes the process by which community members and representatives of local government, the private sector and NGOs working in the city of Cartagena, Colombia, set up a dialogue space that enables them to identify, negotiate and agree climate change adaptation solutions that are legally, financially, socially and technically feasible.

Whitzman, Carolyn, Crystal Legacy, Caroline Andrew, Fran Klodawsky, Margaret Shaw, and Kalpana Viswanath (eds.) Building Inclusive Cities: Women's Safety and the Right to the City London and New Yo...

Urban violence is an increasingly significant global phenomenon. Over the past few years, a conventional wisdom has emerged within policy and research circles associating it with four key factors: poverty, youth bulges, political exclusion and gender-based insecurity. Underpinning this conventional wisdom is the notion that while cities are inherently conflictual spaces, this conflict is generally managed more or less peacefully through a range of social, cultural and political mechanisms, but that this can be disrupted by the presence of these four key factors, all of which can lead to conflict spilling over into chronic, generalised violence.