HyperSext City: Seriously Good Design Puts Gender Inequality Under The Spotlight
We’re welcoming an exploration of equity in public, urban spaces, as Ella Mitchell shares videoworks “A Billion Views” and “Do You Feel Safe?” produced in collaboration with Monash University’s XYX Lab and part of the exhibition HyperSext City. This research project fuses crowdsourced data and video content to reveal the very real challenges for women, girls, and gender diverse individuals, and explores how the design of public space, when it’s not inclusive, has consequences for women’s participation in the public dialog.
HyperSext City, an exhibition that spotlights the issues of gender inequality and gender sensitive design, has been honoured at the Designers Australia 2021 Awards.
HyperSext City was created by XYX Lab, a group of Australian academics at Monash University, and it offers an accessible and compelling visual narrative that illustrates gendered experience in urban life.
photo credit: Brett Brown
The exhibition’s design addresses the spatial inequity in cities by detailing how the gendering of urban space limits the ability of women, girls, and gender diverse people to participate in urban life.
A combination of provocative and bold graphics presents a web of data drawn from a global repository of expert research that documents the lived experiences of women and girls. Two large-scale video works speak to the urgency of designing cities that are responsive to gender inequity.
How do you walk, maybe you ride? How do you choose to move and choose to be, in your city? As the day turns to night, do you change your course, do you consider your plight? Is your sense of safety a fight?
—A Billion Views, HyperSext City script excerpt
A Billion Views is an urban montage that combines historical and futuristic imagery and spoken word. Diverse faces from countries around the globe, including the iconic Malala Yousafzai and former Prime Minister of Australia Julia Gillard, showcase the gendered experience of inequality in public space:
Do You Feel Safe illustrates women’s shared experiences of feeling unsafe in cities. The video centres on a group of women who ask the very simple yet loaded question “Do you Feel Safe?” in English, Spanish, Hindi, Indonesian, and other languages:
I can share stats, I can share news, I can speak of a billion views, of women’s stories and of their names, of lives compromised, of avoidable pain and shame. The politics of public spaces, can be changed and reframed, let's better the options for women and for us all, as we travel for work, play, and to answer our call.
—A Billion Views script excerpt
Produced and directed by Ella Mitchell, co-written by and featuring founding director of XYX Lab Dr Nicole Kalms, the scripts draw on global experiences of women, girls, and the LGBTQI+ communities.
“The medium of video creates a bridge between academic research and a general (non-design) audience. The scripts and images illuminate complex and often sensitive materials to bring humanity and beauty to research activism,” says Dr Kalms.
The HyperSext Repository is the exhibition’s online bespoke website and data storeroom.
The interactive platform collates and references data and research by crowdsourcing from communities, researchers, and individuals across the globe, offering hundreds of cited sources, including the following:
"Women of colour experience harassment from men in public space that intertwines sexualised and racialised abuse."
—Tyler, Megan and Maddy Coy. “Pornographication and Heterosexualisation in Public Space.” In Contentious Cities: Design and the Gendered Production of Space, edited by Jess Berry, Timothy Moore, Nicole Kalms, Gene Bawden, 49-59, 50. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020.
"The experiences not only of women, but of Indigenous peoples and members of the LGBTQI+ community are all shaped by the prevailing realities and the patriarchal context of 'city.'"
—Bawden, Gene. “Introduction. Histories of the gendered city.” In Contentious Cities: Design and the Gendered Production of Space, edited by Jess Berry, Timothy Moore, Nicole Kalms, Gene Bawden, 121-125, 122. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020.
"In South Africa, only 12% of women and girls interviewed by ActionAid felt safe from verbal and physical abuse in their neighbourhoods and 80% of women had experienced some form of abuse in the past year."
—ActionAid. Women and the City III: A summary of baseline data on women’s experience of violence in seven countries. Johannesburg: ActionAid, 2015, 5.
"Public harassment is predominantly perpetrated by men against women and LGBTQ+ people, and as such must be understood as implicated in systems of power and oppression relating to gender, sexuality, and race, amongst others."
—Fileborn, Bianca. “Embodied Geographies. Navigating street harassment.” In In Contentious Cities: Design and the Gendered Production of Space, edited by Jess Berry, Timothy Moore, Nicole Kalms, Gene Bawden, 37- 48, 37. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020.
Ultimately, the exhibition communicates both a warning and an opportunity:
The Opportunity — An invitation to involve women and gender diverse people more directly in urban planning and design through expert consultation.
The Warning — The social and economic risks that women and girls endure as the result of having to limit their interactions with public life because of both real and perceived negative experiences. As Caroline Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, says: “When we exclude half of humanity from the production of knowledge we lose out on potentially transformative insights”.
Above and beyond award accolades, this exhibition has succeeded in animating thousands of women's and girls’ voices who have contributed to the exhibition’s data collection, and it highlights the important role of creative practices in generating a better, fairer world.
Ella Mitchell is an Australian-based content producer/creator with two decades of experience designing communications for media, PR, and entertainment across a wide range of industries, including government, arts, education, and not-for-profit.
End note:
Originally planned to open at a pre-pandemic Venice Architecture Biennale, HyperSext City was launched at the Tin Shed Gallery in Sydney Australia in February 2021. HyperSext City was created by XYX Lab’s co-directors Associate Professor Nicole Kalms and Associate Professor Gene Bawden from Monash Art, Design and Architecture. For full exhibition credits, see https://hypersextcity.com and the featured video end credits.