Abstract Body

A core insight of regenerative development theory is the idea that we can shift from dominance to intimacy with the entity of place. This depends on knowing the ‘place’ on the level of relationship and experience. At the onset, this paper adopts a perspective of gender mainstreaming as a process-oriented approach to safeguard women’s perspectives and everyday life experiences in all urban planning processes from master planning and land use codes to placemaking interventions and soft measures. It also defines woman as a person who identifies as female, and within the spectrum of the gender identity of woman. Finally, it adopts a conceptual living-systems metabolic approach of regeneration endeavouring to turn cities into environmentally benign organisms by actualising circular processes and promoting sustainable trajectories. This paper explores how innovative ways of mapping both the presence and the agency of contemporary women in cities may support the emergence of emancipatory placemaking perspectives and previously unrecorded narratives. It starts by proposing ‘presency’ as a new concept, merging the meaning of presence, as a mindful way of paying attention to life; and agency, as a critical awareness of the context and capacity to act. It examines the revisited role of women in their mediation of space and making of place including efforts to forge a new framework of regenerative urban development. It proposes different mapping approaches to capture a mosaic of regenerative practices led by women addressing how cities of present and future can be green and inclusive. It concludes by suggesting that it is in the experience and practice of the city that we have the best chance of making a just world.