Justine Gloesener

An architect and urban planner, I am a doctoral assistant in the ndrscr, architecture & policy laboratory at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Liège. After working for several years in an architectural practice and completing a dissertation on prostitution and the city, I decided to examine gender in my disciplines.

My current doctoral research is looking at the place of care¹ and its spaces in the socio-historical evolution of the modernist housing estate of Droixhe (Liège) at different scales of inhabitation: from housing to the neighbourhood. What place is given or not given to vulnerabilities in this neighbourhood from its creation to the present day? Does it help to reduce the spatial inequalities that can affect more working-class neighbourhoods? To do this, a spatial interpretation is proposed.

I combine architectural, historical, feminist and social approaches through documentary research in the project archives, interviews with residents and field observations.

These questions make it possible to consider the ethics of care more broadly as a feminist perspective, and hope to sketch out new prospects for a city that is more feminist, caring, attentive to the ordinary and egalitarian.

1. According to Joan Tronto's (2009) feminist approach, following in the footsteps of Carol Gilligan, care includes all the "activities characteristic of the human species, which cover everything we do in order to maintain, perpetuate and repair our world, so that we can live in it as well as possible".