Some notes on how to introduce the gender perspective in urban policies. The case of the Valencian community (Spain)

The current political context of legislative renovation in the Valencian Community (Spain) opens an opportunity to reformulate the relationship of citizens with the city. In this sense, gender perspective provides a privileged path from different historically silenced collectives that, paradigmatically, can provide new tools to interpret reality and to set up new strategies of intervention in housing and urban development. Gender studies applied to housing policies and urbanism accumulate a large number of experiences. However, specific contributions developed to articulate a more accurate legislative body are scarce in the Valencian Community. Hence, this article firstly analyzes previous legislative initiatives introducing gender studies, to secondly extract from this analysis the two main gender paradigms present so far. Under this umbrella part of the Valencian Community public policies applied to housing and urbanism will be evaluated to testify how the gender perspective has been implemented so far, and what is still missing under the two different approaches. The study shows that the deficiencies are remarkable and require an intervention. In fact, the regulatory context of the Valencian Community is characterized by a structural resistance to the assumption of the long tradition of gender studies and its relationship with the city. Nevertheless, these two-gender paradigms identified in this paper open an active reflexion on which is the path that now consciously is wanted to follow in future legislative initiatives.