The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner: Long-term Feminist Planning Initiatives in London, Melbourne, Montréal and Toronto

Abstract

This article develops a framework to evaluate organizational longevity, change and success amongst feminist planning initiatives. It takes a comparative approach, reviewing the histories of four long-lived planning organizations, based in Toronto, Melbourne, Montréal and London. It investigates questions of how feminist planning organizations survive and thrive over the long haul, how they replenish membership and leadership, and how success and limitations can be comparatively analysed.

Keywords:

• Feminism
• feminist organizations
• urban planning advocacy
• Melbourne
• London
• Toronto
• Montréal

Introduction

Since the mid-1990s, doubts have been expressed as to whether feminism, as a political project, is capable of renewing itself, or whether the peak period for feminist advocacy has passed (Disney & Gelb, 2000). A recent article by Rahder & Altilia (2004) points to a decline in feminist content in academic planning curricula, writing and theory, along with continuing under-representation of women in senior positions in the planning profession, as evidence that feminism is fading as a discursive force within planning theory and practice. In the broader arena of international political discourse, feminism has been under external attack by conservative forces, while within feminist movements, postmodernism and postcolonialism have challenged the notion of gender as a universal experience and primary characteristic (Baden & Goetz, 1997; Roy, 2001).

However, there is some contradictory evidence that a new generation of feminists are achieving greater equality in planning processes and results. In a recent article, Bashevkin (2005) contrasts the decline of feminist activism at the local governance level in Toronto with its resurgence in London. Gender mainstreaming, the incorporation of a gender equality perspective in the improvement, development and evaluation of policy processes, has become a statutory requirement for member states of the European Union (Greed, 2002). At the international level, the promotion of women's participation in all urban issues, including the development of social and physical infrastructure and strategic planning schemes, is encouraged by both the World Bank and by the United Nations Commission on Housing and Settlements, UN-Habitat (UNCHS, 2001).

From the start of the current wave of feminist urban planning activism—often seen as the founding of Women and Environments magazine by Gerda Wekerle, Rebecca Peterson and David Morley, after the first UN- Habitat conference in 1975 (Greed, 2001)—there has been a plethora of books and articles theorizing feminist planning, describing local initiatives and critiquing “mainstream” planning processes from a feminist perspective (Beauregard, 1992; Eichler, 1995; Greed, 1994; Hayden & Wright, 1976; Journal of Architecture and Planning Practice, 1992; Leavitt, 1986; Little, 1994; Milroy, 1991; Reeves, 2005; Sandercock & Forsyth, 1992; Watson, 1999). However, there are relatively few articles that focus on feminist planning organizations, and fewer still that take a comparative approach in order to develop frameworks to measure successful activism in the planning realm. Given a 30-year history, there are questions of how feminist planning organizations survive and thrive over the long haul, how they replenish membership and leadership, how long-term practitioners and leaders define their successes and their limitations, how and why some initiatives continue and others fade away over time. Although organizational sustainability is not necessarily a goal in and of itself (Disney & Gelb, 2000; Marcuse, 1998), the question of how feminist planning organizations sustain themselves, and make change, over time is the rich but under-researched theme of this article.

This article focuses on three feminist planning organizations and one feminist local government initiative within wealthy cities of the developed world, three predominantly Anglophone (Toronto, London, Melbourne), and one Francophone (Montréal). All four cities have undergone local governance restructuring over the past 10 years, with radically different results for governance, planning and gender mainstreaming. Three of the initiatives, from Toronto, London and Montréal, have existed since the 1980s; the Melbourne organization is the relative newcomer, with only 11 years of work behind it. The four reflect contrasting models of feminist work “in and against the state” (phrase from London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group, 1979). In Montréal, Femmes et Ville began as an oppositional movement by feminist planners disgruntled with the absence of a gender analysis inside local planning, then quickly became part of the structure of local governance. London's Women's Design Service was established in the heyday of the Greater London Council (GLC) and supported by a grant from that organization, but after the abolition of the GLC in 1986 became a registered charity undertaking planning and design consultancy work. Women Plan Toronto's origins are in a networking organization for women planners, but it operated as a feminist research and advocacy group independent and critical of the local state for most of its history. The Women's Planning Network of Victoria (the Australian state whose capital and largest city is Melbourne) began and still remains a professional “women in planning” organization with stable funding from the state government. While not overtly “feminist”, this article will argue that their concerns fit within the rubric of feminism and the body of feminist planning practice. Together, their histories provide insight into evolving feminist perspectives on difference, citizenship and urban planning, within the changing urban political environments in which these initiatives operate.

The initiatives were chosen partly because the organizations and some of their membership were known to the author, based as they are in four cities in which she has lived over the past 20 years. But these four initiatives were also purposely chosen for their organizational diversity. Beyond an emphasis on women's perspectives and involvement in planning, the four initiatives have little in common in terms of structure, goals, origins or membership base. Because of the small sampling set, there will not be sweeping statements about “what works and what does not” in feminist planning advocacy, but the article will be outline a tentative framework for analysis of feminist planning organizational success.

The methodology used in this study was a set of comparative case studies. In-depth interviews with a “leader” who had been involved from the beginning were requested from the four organizations, with a similar set of questions asked about origins, management structures, funding, membership, highs and lows over time, achievements, process of prioritizing, definitions of success and challenges for the future. The interviews were supplemented with information from the websites and archives of the organization and any published scholarly or popular articles that referred to the organization.

“Femocratic Feminisms” and “Urban Citizenship”: Ways to Measure Success in Gendered Local Governance and Planning

What makes an initiative or an organization feminist? Riger (1994) characterizes feminism as a range of ideologies, rather than a unitary set of beliefs, but contends that they share an understanding of women as a subordinate group and seek to redress this imbalance. Martin (1990) provides a set of criteria, any one of which might characterize a feminist organization: a feminist ideology (calling themselves feminist); feminist guiding principles (of mutual caring, support, or co-operation); feminist goals (improving equality or fighting discrimination, either internally through “raising consciousness” or externally through lobbying); or producing feminist outcomes (such as changing members or society). Both Martin and Riger argue that although many feminist organizations began with a collectivist structure, a more traditional hierarchical or legalistic structure is not inimical to a feminist organization. Martin, Riger and also Staeheli (2004) would all argue that organizations do not have to call themselves feminist, or even use the “f” word in their discourse or materials, to qualify as a feminist organization. Nor do organizations need to be exclusively, or even primarily, made up of women. All that is necessary is an analysis that includes an understanding of the economic and social inequalities between men and women as gender groups, along with some commitment to improving these inequalities.

As discussed in the first paragraph, the notion of “gender” and “feminism” as solid theoretical constructs, has been challenged in recent years. As Young (1990) has famously written, the ideal of community expressed within feminism “privileges unity over difference, immediacy over mediation, sympathy over recognition of the limits of one's understanding of others from their point of view” (p. 300). In the specific context of planning, having attacked mainstream planning's lumping of “the public” as unitary, feminist planners may have simply divided this concept into two equally unitary and undifferentiated lumps. In poorer countries, the emphasis on gender mainstreaming may not only de-politicize other aspects of struggle, but may conflate ends with means (Baden & Goetz, 1997). There is a constant tension between seeking equality with men, which may result in assimilation to an unjust or unhealthy norm, and celebrating difference, which may lead to continuing inequalities being excused as expressions of “culture” (Nicholson, 1994). In more recent years, feminist literature in general, and feminist planning literature in particular, has recognized different masculinities and femininities, based not only on features of identity such as ethnicity, sexuality, religious belief, income, age and physical and mental abilities, but also on affinity, the desire to identify at a particular point in time with possibly shifting aspects of one's identity (Young, 1990; see also Nicholson, 1994).

There are many ways to categorize and theorize feminist planning advocacy, beginning with the level and scale of intervention. In the past 30 years, community activists, academics and bureaucrats (sometimes combining aspects of the various roles, and generally working within the context of organizations) have demanded a gendered approach to specific “collective goods, services and programmes”, particularly affordable housing, employment schemes, public transportation, violence against women services such as emergency shelters and rape crisis centres, and social infrastructure such as childcare centres, community facilities and health clinics. Residents have fought collectively at the neighbourhood level to create, save or improve particular housing projects, schools, parks, community gathering places and employment programmes. These localized initiatives can make a huge difference to the lives of particular women and men, and can also have a galvanizing impact beyond the immediate goal being achieved. For instance, Leavitt & Saegart (1990) have written about how the efforts of a group of low-income African American women to save their homes inspired initiatives throughout New York City and beyond.

Moving from the “micro” to the “mezo” levels, an argument for specific local government “policies” that better integrate between home, work and leisure has been presented, deriving from recognition of women's greater responsibility for housework and care of dependents (Healey, 1997; Watson, 1999). In the realm of housing, feminists have argued that the lower income of women as a group as compared to men as a group, especially women-led households, means that women are more dependent on affordable and social housing being provided throughout cities and regions, particularly social housing for single-parent families (Watson & Austerberry, 1986). In terms of public transportation, there have been socio-economic arguments for cheaper, more extensive, and better serviced public transportation systems, and more integrated land-use mix. Furthermore, a gendered analysis of violence and insecurity in both public and private space has led to calls for better provision of safe space, whether this consists of local public education campaigns on domestic violence or ameliorating public space to help prevent violence and insecurity (Greed, 1994; McGregor, 1995; Watson, 1999).

Developing initiatives based in local governance but having a national or international “governance” component, feminist activists in planning and related fields of interest have demanded gender mainstreaming, which might include gendered analysis of statistics, budgets and programmes; consultation exercises that are easier to understand and more inclusive of all women's concerns and suggestions for improvement; specific planning initiatives to redress imbalances such as funding for women's organizations to develop affordable social housing; and strategic local and regional plans that take women's housing and employment needs into consideration (Beall, 1996; IULA,1998; Little, 1994). As a mechanism for change, there have been demands for formal women's committees at the local government level, for greater consultation and partnerships with organizations serving women, and for greater representation of women within senior levels of the planning profession and local governance institutions such as local councils and special planning boards (Bashevkin, 2005; Greed, 1994, 2001; Little, 1994; Morgan, 2002; Watson, 1992; Wekerle, 2004). These activities have taken place largely at the local scale, but there have been efforts to co-ordinate and learn from best practice at the national scale (e.g. FCM, 2004), and at the international scale (eg. Whitzman et al., 2004).

Finally, there have been attempts at the theoretical level to integrate a feminist analysis into planning theory, the epistemology and ontology of how people understand planning and what people do as planning decision-makers (Beauregard, 1992; Milroy, 1991; Roy, 2001; Sandercock & Forsyth 1992). As Roy points out, planning and feminism share a concern with guiding change in a normative fashion. Feminism has challenged planning to accept the notion of multiple publics that it might potentially serve, and has also challenged the positivist and “expert” based foundation of modernist planning. In turn, both planning and feminism have been suspended in the “borderlands” between modernism and postmodernism, between older certainties and newer uncertainties about identity, power, control and knowing (Roy, 2001). As planning faces an uncertain future, due to changing norms about environmental sustainability, heightened expectations including participation in decision making, and the changing roles of various levels of governance (Gleeson, 2003), the possibly declining position of feminism within planning may be that of a querulous rat on a sinking ship. Or it may be a continuing force and focus for essential change within planning theory and practice.

Which leads to the question: what does success look like within feminist planning organizations? Using the US feminist movement as an example, Disney & Gelb (2000) note that most social movement theorists focus on the origins, formation and mobilization of organizations, rather than organizational change over time. They argue that success is too often conflated with survival of an organization, while lack of success is conflated with its demise. As Staggenborg (1995) discusses, organizations can be successful at the same time that they self-destruct, if they leave behind a policy impact, pools of activists, or models of collective action. Using previous research of Staggenborg (1995) and Minkoff (1995) as a basis, Disney & Gelb (2000) propose four possible measures of success, matched with mechanisms to achieve success. First and at the most basic level, developing and maintaining access to human and economic resources leads to organizational maintenance and survival. Second, they argue that co-operation and negotiation between feminist organizations, and between feminist and non-feminist organizations, can lead to achievement of policy objectives. Third, renegotiating internal organizational structures and decision-making structures can lead to mobilization of a human and economic resource base which provides the infrastructure for not only survival, but the development of a new generation of activists. Fourth, an expansion of a feminist agenda (including work by organizations that are not explicitly feminist) can lead to challenging patriarchal ideas and norms. Any one of these four outcomes—achievement of policy objectives, building a human or economic resource base for future organizing within feminism or in another movement, challenging patriarchal norms in public or private discourse, or organizational adaptation/survival, could be seen as a success. Adapting this framework to planning practice, feminist organizations can be successful if they develop goods and services, programmes and policies that reduce inequalities between men and women; establish or transform governance structures or models that facilitate more equitable participation in planning processes; further discursive or theoretical understandings of how planning functions towards an end of more equitable outcomes; or help produce a new and better-informed generation of planning activists placed either within institutional structures, or as external advocates, for more equitable planning outcomes.

One of the problems with this framework is that it sets the bar rather low. It might be argued that any advocacy exercise has some positive impact on people or on practices. The framework also sets up a somewhat binary analytic framework. There is little direction given on how to measure to what extent policy objectives might be achieved, patriarchal norms challenged or hearts and minds changed. To enhance the framework for measuring organizational success, particularly within planning practice, the following can also be added: the aspects of scale and sustainability to the achievement of policy objectives; the question of measurable impacts to the improvement in human or economic resources devoted to equitable planning outcomes; the extent to which gender has been become explicit within the relevant planning environments as a result of organizational advocacy; and the extent to which diversity of women has been accommodated within feminist organizations over time (see Table 1).

Table 1. A framework for evaluating feminist planning organizational success (based on Disney & Gelb, 2000)

Goals	Mechanisms for Success	Measurements of Success
Achievement of policy objectives (goods, services, policies, programmes)	Co-operation and negotiation between organizations, governments, and possibly, the private sector	Measurable outcomes (did the change lead to reduced inequalities?) At what scale? Are results written up? Is success replicable to other places and at other scales? Do goods, services, or policies last over time?
Organizational adaptation and survival (sustainable planning mechanisms and organizations)	Developing and maintaining economic and human resources: getting money and new members	Has the organization survived? How many members? How secure is the funding?
Building a resource base for future organizing (better informed and more representative planners and institutions)	Renegotiating internal organizational structures, including the recognition of diversity	Have members changed and expanded over time? Have they involved a younger generation? Has diversity been recognized within the organization, and if so, how? Has the organization helped diversification of planners and planning institutions?
Challenging patriarchal ideas and norms (policies, analysis, governance, theory)	Expansion of a feminist agenda within the planning and governance environment	Has the organization been successful in embedding an understanding of gender or other grounds of difference within planning and governance? Are there equity improvements traceable to advocacy by this organization?

Success is easiest to measure at the neighbourhood scale, where a specific policy objective might either be achieved or not (although a housing project or women's centre can be developed, then face considerable challenges to stay open or serve its clients). At the more complex level of the potential impacts of a gender mainstreamed approach to policy and governance, Bashevkin (2005) is among the first theorists to develop measurements of success in the citizenship outcomes of gender mainstreaming in cities. Her criteria in measuring the different outcomes of local government restructuring on women's citizenship includes representation on political bodies, the development of femocracies (feminist bureaucratic initiatives), and representation within strategic plans. However, many writers have been quick to note that relatively formal measures of representation (how many women are elected, the presence of a women's committee or unit, a policy statement on gender) do not necessarily mean that marginalized women are included in political processes (Baden & Goetz 1997; Staeheli, 2004). Even if there is greater inclusion in citizenship policies and processes, outcomes of greater social and economic equity along gender or other lines may not be achieved or be provable. To give one example, the goal of reducing violence against women is notoriously unmeasurable, because police statistics only measure the tip of the iceberg in terms of “private” violence, victimization surveys are infrequent and often do not ask the right questions of women, and the generational nature of violence in the home means that success might only be measurable over a long span of years (Whitzman & Mayes, 2005). Having said that, some international governance agencies, such as the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations, have incorporated indicators that include a gendered analysis as way to measure progress towards goals (World Health Organization, 2005), and the development of gendered indicators has also taken place at the local, state, and national levels in Australia, Canada and the UK. These indicators might include whole-population goals of educational attainment, percentage of households living in poverty and levels of employment, but they break these statistics down by gender in order to see if inequalities between sexes are increasing or decreasing.

Aside from scale and impact, feminist planning activities have sometimes been placed along a continuum of mainstreaming/disengagement, with “mainstreaming” or working within existing structures at one end, and “disengagement” or working outside structures such as government at the other end (Adamson, 1988). Mainstreaming and disengagement are constantly mutable; services such as childcare, rape crisis centres and assaulted women's shelters, conceived outside the government system in the 1970s, have over time become part of government funding and oversight structures. This may be as much a function of femocrats, or feminist bureaucrats, working within the body politic to develop funding and policy structures, as any lessening of feminist zeal on behalf of the organizers (Watson, 1992). Closely related to this continuum is the contrast between “formal” women's involvement in local politics, through mechanisms such as women's committees and getting feminist councillors elected, with “informal” engagement, which would include involvement with schools, housing and neighbourhood associations, migrant settlement groups, and service organizations that are not necessarily gender oriented (Brownill & Halford, 1990). While some of these initiatives are overtly feminist, some initiatives have been led by women without having a feminist analysis or any overt goal beyond the immediate attainment of a good or service. As Staeheli (2004) points out, the opportunities for an overt politics of difference are constrained in many situations, ranging from the lack of any local organization with transformative goals, to the likelihood of women identifying with other elements of their identity beyond gender, such as income, ethnicity, “race”, or sexuality.

Finally, women's planning initiatives might be placed along a scale in relation to accommodation of differences between women (Young, 1990). Saying that “women” are more involved in local governance is no guarantee that the voices of those marginalized by ethnicity/culture, disability or sexuality are being included in decision-making processes. Rather, as Staeheli (2004)says:

politics of difference … takes a goal of building a more inclusive polity by according legitimacy to the experiences and identities that are particular, rather than abstract, and that are grounded in the experiences of everyday life. (p. 349)

The extent to which women's groups, whether overtly feminist or not, can balance the diversity of voices with a coherent message, is another constantly mutable element of the initiatives I will now proceed to discuss.

Women Plan Toronto and the Perils of Marginalization

If the success of an organization could be measured by the number of scholarly articles referencing it, Women Plan Toronto (WPT) would probably be the most successful feminist planning organization of all time (e.g. Bashevkin, 2005; Rahder, 1998; Wekerle, 1999; Whitzman, 2002). The scrutiny given Women Plan Toronto is particularly ironic, given that at its height the organization had at most 50 active members, mostly professional and academic women from European backgrounds. It was thus neither particularly diverse, nor particularly strong. However, the organization was influential in the politics of Canada's largest city-region, with 7 million inhabitants, located within Canada's most populous province, Ontario. It could also legitimately claim to be based in a politics of broad public consultation, which constantly returned to the “experiences of everyday life” as expressed by a variety of women in focus groups, in order to replenish its policy advocacy work.

Women Plan Toronto arose from the ashes of a professional women planners' organization called Women in/and Planning. Inspired by the 1976 UN-Habitat conference, Women in/and Planning received a grant from the federal government to hold a local conference in 1982. Tensions between women as planning professionals (several working in fairly senior levels within local and provincial government) and women who wanted a more activist and oppositional role, led to a split in the group by 1984. At that time, a consultation process led by the Greater London Council, Women Plan London, became known to a member of Women in/and Planning, Reggie Modlich, through an article in Women and Environments Magazine (Taylor, 1985). A femocrat within the federal government encouraged and was willing to find funding for a grassroots participatory research process based on this feminist planning exercise, and the endeavour was also supported by feminist academic dian marino [sic], at York University's Faculty of Environmental Studies (personal communication, Reggie Modlich).

Published in 1985, Women Plan Toronto: Shared Experiences and Dreams was the result of 25 focus groups, mostly piggybacked onto the agendas of already existing organizations: women in the paid workforce (ranging from rape crisis centre workers to executive members of the Toronto Women Teachers Association), full-time homemakers regularly meeting in parent-child drop-ins, women who were homeless and in unstable housing who used a drop-in centre, immigrant women in English as a Second Language groups, young women (in high schools and universities), elderly women and women with physical disabilities in respective advocacy groups. The questions asked were simple. First, what elements of the urban landscape, from the design of homes, to metropolitan transportation, worked and did not work for women engaged in everyday activities. Second, what solutions did they suggest for problems they encountered (“wouldn't it be nice if”). Third, what participating women thought of the workshop (evaluation). Individual and collective drawings were an important component of the workshops. The consultation was guided by an advisory group of community representatives. Those who attended the conference that launched the report were asked to join the nascent organization to “get the recommendations carried out”. At that point, “quite a few did and became part of what best could be described as a WPT collective” (personal communication, Reggie Modlich). The initial consultation and the subsequent conference was probably the height of the organization's membership and its diversity.

Women Plan Toronto was rudimentary in its management structure. According to Reggie, no one ever took responsibility to become president or treasurer. Instead, people took responsibility for tasks (such as preparing a deputation on a planning, transportation or safety issue) on a fairly ad hoc basis. There were fairly regular meetings over the years, along with a newsletter and a mailing list, but “a traditional organization with positions, tight checks and balances never developed” (personal communication, Reggie Modlich). There was never core funding for the group. During the Shared Experiences and Dreams project, the City of Toronto provided office space, but when the organization turned to advocacy, they were forced to rent outside space. As long as projects could be funded from the federal Status of Women Office, or the provincial government (usually the Ministry of Housing or Planning rather than the Ontario Women's Directorate), the group was able to employ a part-time co-ordinator. Annual budgets for the first 10 years of the organization rarely exceeded $50 000, and fell to almost zero after that.

The group developed good relationships with some funders, but were never able to access many others because of its nature as an advocacy, rather than a direct service, organization. As Reggie states, “the funding process also required middle-class literacy, language, structuring/reasoning, record keeping, and meeting deadlines … this is one reason why the group failed to become more diverse” (personal communication). The members were diverse in terms of age and sexuality, but less diverse in terms of ethnicity or income, being mostly middle-class women of European origin.

However, the organization was successful in advocacy projects for its first 10 years. In 1987, a similar research process to the first report led to the development of a report on making urban environments safer for women (Sterner, 1987). The activists involved in this report, helped influence the development of a “women's safety audit kit” by the Metropolitan Toronto Committee on Public Violence Against Women and Children (METRAC), and successfully advocated for the creation of the City of Toronto Safe City Committee, a standing committee of the local government that focused on prevention of violence against women and other vulnerable groups (City of Toronto, 1988; METRAC, 1989). In 1988, Women Plan Toronto developed an extremely successful municipal Election Project, funded once again by the federal Status of Women office. This project involved over 50 women as “ward watchers”, who researched elected officials' voting records and asked questions related to the initial concerns identified by the consultation process of candidates. The results of this project were well reported by local media, and several female candidates reported unofficially to the author (who worked on this project as a student) that their candidatures were given a boost by the publicity. There were follow-up projects in the next two municipal elections of 1991 and 1994, which also received positive media coverage, including the questions being reproduced in Canada's largest daily newspaper.

When a feminist-friendly progressive provincial government was elected in Ontario in 1990, Women Plan Toronto was able to secure several years of funding to carry out a series of projects related to gender and urban intensification. The organization was part of a coalition that successfully lobbied for “as of right” second units as a measure benefiting affordable housing, and they also carried out workshops with suburban residents' associations on the social, economic and environmental benefits of increasing densities. While these workshops complemented the provincial governments' policy directives, WPT also sought to engage communities in proactive planning to ensure that new developments and redevelopment would meet their needs, rather than just being a cash cow for developers. In the later 1990s, a project on home-based paid work, funded by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, once again used focus groups with a variety of women who did paid work from their homes (from garment workers to professional consultants) to develop three designs for “common work centres”, shared spaces within residential areas (Hare & Johnson, 1999).

Some advocacy projects were less successful. A long struggle to get women's needs incorporated into the City of Toronto's 1991 and 2002 metropolitan strategic plans developed some interesting feminist evaluations of the planning process, but discussion of difference in the final documents remained, at best, implicit (Bashevkin, 2005). When a Conservative provincial government was elected in 1995, affordable housing and inclusive social planning measures advocated for by WPT and other groups were rolled back. Women Plan Toronto was among the host of community organizations that unsuccessfully opposed the forced amalgamation of the City of Toronto with five suburban municipalities in 1997/98 and the consequent loss of two committees using a gendered analysis, the Safe City Committee and the Status of Women Committee (Bashevkin, 2005; Whitzman, 2002). With decreasing senior government funding for advocacy organizations in the late 1990s, the organization was essentially dormant after 2000, although it formally ceased to exist only in 2004. To some extent, the organization was superseded by a new group, called the Toronto Women's Call to Action, formed in February 2004 to press the new progressive Mayor for an “effective women's advisory committee, a gender-based city budgeting process, and the inclusion of women's concerns in local planning activities” (Bashevkin, 2005, p. 23). Thus far, this new organization has managed to reinstate the Status of Women Committee, but has not met with success in the other two goals.

There was no formal evaluation of specific WPT projects, nor of the organization itself. While Reggie's involvement since the origins of WPT meant that there was an element of continuity, the development of the organization was also impeded by its over-identification with one woman. Reggie also believes that WPT tended to focus too much on small-scale improvements and policy-specific actions, rather than more embedded gender mainstreaming projects. Unfortunately, by the time the concept of gender mainstreaming entered the consciousness of the Toronto group (from the UK work of Clara Greed and others in the early 2000s), many of WPT's members were caught up in motherhood and full-time employment, and the local political climate, still reeling from the aftershocks of amalgamation, was not especially conducive to one more campaign.

Aside from issues of scale, the story of Women Plan Toronto exemplifies both the advantages and disadvantages of a relatively disengaged advocacy group. Because WPT constantly critiqued local government structures (particularly within the City of Toronto's planning department, but also critiquing suburban planning), it was both inappropriate and unlikely to be funded by these local governments. Because its membership was made up primarily of women working as planners in local and senior governments and as consultants to these governments, there was sometimes a difficult personal balance between advocacy and accommodation. There were many members of WPT who joined as students, such as myself, and then found it difficult to strongly advocate as outsiders once we had obtained “inside” jobs. Successful in consultation and policy development arising from these consultations, but unsuccessful over the long-term in embedding change within local governance and replenishing its membership: this is the equivocal legacy of Women Plan Toronto.

Women's Planning Network and the Mixed Results of Mainstreaming

Across the globe, the story of Melbourne's Women's Planning Network (WPN) reads like what might have happened if the Toronto organization had stayed focused on its original goal of advancing women within the planning profession. Melbourne is the second largest city in Australia, with a little over 3.5 million people in its metropolitan area, approximately half the size of Toronto. Metropolitan Melbourne dominates the State of Victoria, which has a population of 5 million, but there is no political representation for the region, or strong city centre government. Unlike Toronto, with a central city government of 650 000 before amalgamation and 2.5 million after amalgamation, metropolitan Melbourne and the state as a whole is covered by a patchwork of small municipalities, 31 in the metropolitan region alone.

In 1992, a conservative state government was elected in Victoria. Not long afterwards, and through professional connections with the new Planning Minister, two fairly high profile women in planning, Roz Hansen and Jeanette Rickards, one the founder of a successful planning consultancy business, the other a respected planning lawyer, were able to successfully advocate for a new organization to be funded by the state government. This organization would focus on “local government reform; safety in the city, suburbs, and regional Victoria; heritage issues; environmental concerns; professional development for women in planning fields; and other planning related topics” (Office of the Minister of Planning and Development, 1994).

The Women's Planning Network arose partially because of dissatisfaction with the way that the Royal Australian Planners Institute (now the Planning Institute of Australia) was responding to the needs and voices of women planners. Like Toronto's Women in/and Planning, the WPN launched itself with a conference on Women in Planning and Development. Unlike the Toronto conference, the event was funded by the state government and the conference was opened by the Planning Minister. Although WPN was a separately incorporated body with its own board of directors, the WPN office was housed within the Planning Ministry until 2003. Rather than an oppositional stance, WPN was taking a classic liberal model of developing change from an “insider” stance.

The initial membership was made up of planning lawyers, professional planners in government and private practice, as well as a smaller group of people in related fields such as urban design, landscape architecture and engineering. This varied membership has remained a constant. There was considerable leadership from women in part-time work and on maternity leave as well as full-time planners, but not many students. The membership has recently undergone generational renewal, with a larger number of young women in full-time employment. There is an annual fee to become a member, but the fee has been kept low: $US24 per annum in 1994, rising to $60 ($28 for students and concessionaires) by 2005. The majority of funding for the organization's activities comes from a stable though small operating grant of approximately $20 000 per annum from the state government, which has continued despite a change in the state government in 2000. WPN's structure is conventional, with office-bearers (president, treasurer, management committee) elected at Annual General Meetings, a quarterly newsletter, and a website (http://home.vicnet.net.au/ ∼ womennet/). It has been staffed by a part-time co-ordinator since its inception.

A key emphasis of WPN has been on “value for membership”, membership services that respond to the needs of their constituency, professional planners. This has been part of an effort to attract younger women to the organization, who reputedly are less likely to be comfortable with the term “feminism” or the idea of gender-based organizations. Women's Planning Network has aimed, since its inception, to carry out bi-monthly networking and professional development events, such as (in 2005) an International Women's Day breakfast report-back on a conference on Gender Planning in Bilbao, a breakfast walk to view recent urban design initiatives along the Yarra River, a dinner for rural and regional women planners, and a forum for women leaders concerned about balancing home and work life. Since 2002, it has sponsored a mentorship programme for young women planners, and has also sponsored a scholarship for a planning student. Aside from its goals of supporting and promoting women in planning-related professions, it also includes research and advocacy as core activities, generally obtaining supplementary funding for its research activities from local and state governments and the charitable sector. The organization has taken on one research project per year, ranging from a gendered analysis of transportation issues, to women's perceptions of safety in the central city, to ideas for better design of housing for young single women. A major emphasis has been increasing the role of women in local governance, including electing more women councillors and advocating for more “women-friendly” public consultation. In collaboration with several other organizations, WPN formed a Women's Participation in Local Governance Coalition in 2001 (Collaborations, 2002; Morgan, 2002; Morgan & Charlesworth, 2002). While all of these activities might be defined as feminist, the organization does not use the “f” word. The organization has not carried out focus groups to determine women's planning needs or priorities, in the manner of Women Plan Toronto. The research priorities are decided upon by the managing committee.

The Women's Planning Network's emphasis on professional advancement and mentoring opportunities for young planners has led to considerable organizational success. Membership has increased to 200, and the majority of the board is now women under 35. There have been no particular efforts to attract or support women marginalized through grounds other than gender, although over the past year, WPN has been trying to reach out to women planners working in rural and regional areas beyond metropolitan Melbourne.

Like WPT, WPN has never undergone a formal evaluation of either its organization or its individual projects. Its core funding from the state government appears stable, and it is also able to consistently obtain supplementary funding for its research projects. Its membership is also relatively stable and the management committee has been replenished by younger women. An initial goal, according to Roz, was to be accepted as a legitimate “player” within the professional planning sector, and it has accomplished this goal, in her opinion (personal communication, Roz Hansen). However, unlike WPT, it has not engaged in the major local political debates of the past 10 years. In 1994/95, as the establishment of the organization was being supported by the state government, a radical transformation of both local government and the planning system was occurring. Despite having no mention of specific local governance reform in their 1992 election campaign, and no public consultation on the issue, the state government amalgamated 210 local councils into 79 in 1994. Elected councillors were sacked by the state government, which appointed commissioners to supervise compulsory tendering of all local government services. Even after local democracy was re-instated in 1996/97, the state government appointed Chief Executive Officers for all 79 councils, thus attempting to ensure its reforms would continue over the long term (Aulich, 1999). In the meantime, local government control over the planning process was largely deregulated and previous metropolitan planning policies, such as protection of outer suburban green wedges, were relaxed by the state government (Mees, 2003). When a politically comparable state government took similar measures in the late 1990s in Toronto, WPT was part of a coalition of neighbourhood, social justice and environmental groups who fought these initiatives, from the perspective of women as citizens. In contrast, WPN was largely silent on these measures, and the organization was quite disengaged from the coalition of advocacy groups that helped elect a more progressive state government in 1999. Similarly, WPN has remained largely distant from the battles over the implementation of a new regional plan, Melbourne 2030, developed by the state government in 2002. Its commitment to attracting and supporting more women in local government and senior planning positions, and to advocating for better public consultancy practices has not extended to any advocacy for gender mainstreaming or other feminist concerns in local or state government budgets or planning processes. Women's Planning Network's strengths and weaknesses appear to perfectly complement the story of Women Plan Toronto. Successful in replenishing membership and attracting stable funding, it has largely shied away from advocacy towards fundamental change within the planning or local governance systems.

Femmes et Ville: From Local Femocracy to International Coalition

There is a return to Canada for a third story of feminist planning in action, the Femmes et Ville initiative of the City of Montréal (FeV). Unlike Toronto, there was little history of feminist planning advocacy by the late 1980s in Montréal, Canada's second largest city, with a similar metropolitan population to Melbourne, approximately 3.5 million people. Like Toronto but unlike Melbourne, the metropolitan area was dominated by a strong central city, by 1988 comprising a little less than 1 million inhabitants. When public consultations were held for its draft masterplan, some feminist planners noted the absence of any gender analysis. An ad hoc group of eight women, calling itself “le collectif Femmes et Ville”, wrote a series of recommendations to incorporate issues like safety, housing, services, and the place of children in the city. Because of the tight timelines of the consultation schedule, there was little time to undertake the kind of focus group research that informed Women Plan Toronto, although WPT's document, along with other feminist planning literature, was cited in the submission.

Their submission was initially ignored by the planning commission that heard them. However, late in the year, the new Mayor of the City, encouraged by a high profile feminist in the Executive Committee, decided to revisit the document. By the summer of 1989, a report was released that agreed with almost all of the recommendations, and an interdepartmental committee within the bureaucracy was created to implement these directives (Whitzman & Lahaise, 1990). One of the eight members of this collective was hired to co-ordinate an action plan, and a conference on Women and Urban Space was organized to raise public awareness on this hitherto unrecognized issue which had suddenly become embedded in local governance.

A priority for this new initiative was to develop ties with local feminist groups, such as local women's centres, the rape crisis centre and a women's self-defence organization, which had hitherto not considered local planning issues to be a priority. These organizations contributed their expertise to a series of safety audits in neighbourhoods around Montréal in 1990, and by 1992, a second conference, entitled “J'Accuse La Peur” (Beyond Fear) led to the creation of an external advocacy organization, the Action Committee on Women and Urban Safety (CAFSU in its French acronym). While some of the housing and childcare recommendations became embedded in the health and social services department, FeV and CAFSU together made violence against women and the fear of violence its policy priority (CAFSU, 2002). Like Toronto's Safe City Committee, another local government femocracy supported by advocacy organizations (Whitzman, 2002), CAFSU shared the FeV goal to make planners, architects and developers more aware of the principles of safer space. The initiative generated action on the recommendations of dozens of neighbourhood safety audits, and worked with the public transportation authority to improve the safety of its services. With the City of Montréal police-led crime prevention programme, they developed several public education campaigns, including a “Men Say No” campaign which ran from 1993 to 1995 on what men could do to prevent violence against women. They also commissioned academic research on women and urban fear, and women's safety in relation to neighbourhood planning (for links to French documents, see CAFSU, 2002 and Michaud, 2004a).

One of the priorities of this femocratic enterprise was to embed their local governance initiative within the neighbourhood scale at one end, and the provincial, federal and international scales at the other end. In 1995, three neighbourhood-based intersectoral committees, based in the health and social services department, took on both domestic violence and safety in the streets, and a fourth neighbourhood action project was added in 2000. These projects were based in low-income neighbourhoods undergoing redevelopment, and included outreach to new migrants and other cultural and linguistic minorities. Outside Montréal, the Québec provincial government supported the dissemination of Montréal's model to 10 rural and regional municipalities (Michaud, 2004b). The Co-ordinator of FeV between 1992 and 2004, Anne Michaud, also attended many international congresses on crime prevention and women and local governance, to share the City of Montréal's positive experiences, increase the City of Montréal's awareness and learning from international initiatives, and ensure that the feminist planning viewpoint was included in the agendas of these international meetings.

In the late 1990s, the co-ordinators of four Canadian initiatives on women and community safety, from Toronto, Montréal, Ottawa and rural British Columbia, began organizing a national conference on Women and Safety. This group quickly expanded to develop the capacity for an international conference, held in Montréal in 2002. A networking organization was established to publicize the conference, calling itself Femmes et Villes International in order to acknowledge the leadership of the Montréal project. Women in Cities International, which incorporated in 2003, has since helped organize another international conferences on women and safer communities, in Bogota in 2004, an international award, and an online listserv to join together local initiatives (www.womenincities.org). The network also took a leadership role in the co-ordination of activities on gender and local governance at the Third World Urban Forum in Vancouver in June 2006 (Andrew, 2006).

In the meantime, the local FeV initiative was being transformed. The formal budget of FeV had always been small, covering the full-time salary of the co-ordinator. Other projects, whether conferences, publications, public education and advocacy programmes or research, were supported by line items in other City departments, or with funding from senior government sources such as Status of Women Canada. However, such a remarkably successful feminist enterprise also brought with it considerable resentment, from within the bureaucracy as much as from anti-feminist politicians. When Montréal, like Toronto and Melbourne, underwent an amalgamation exercise in 2001/02, the former City of Montréal joined with 27 small suburban municipalities and almost doubled its population. Unlike Toronto and Melbourne, the City of Montréal strongly supported what it saw an annexation of several relatively wealthy Anglophone suburbs by a financially strapped central city, which would improve its positioning within the global economy (Boudreau, 2003). However, the amalgamation also provided an opportunity to reconsider several of its initiatives. While the FeV initiative was given a vote of confidence as the result of a meeting with community stakeholders in 2002, the new focus became gender equality in local governance, rather than women's safety. Although the area and population of the city had doubled, there were no more financial or human resources pledged to the initiative by the new city administration, and the co-ordinator asked to be re-assigned in 2004. The responsibility of the initiative was then handed to a series of non-permanent staff people as a part-time assignment. CAFSU also ceased operation in 2004, due to reduced abilities of non-profit feminist organizations to commit such a large amount of their time to municipal advocacy. New leadership, in the form of a Conseil des Montréalaises (Council of Montréal Women), continued their advocacy with the City of Montréal. However, by the time of the writing of this article (early 2006), there was no full-time co-ordinator and the future of the initiative was still uncertain.

The story of the FeV initiative is like a feminist planning fairy tale: a small group of women create a document on the spur of the moment which goes on to become the basis for a strong, effective, and long-lived municipal initiative, continuing to this day. While there was a core group of community activists and academics who supported CAFSU, the bureaucratic aspect of FeV was strongly identified with one person. As was the case in Toronto, this over-identification of an initiative with an individual carried a personal as well as an organizational cost. Anne, like Reggie, was the repository of a great deal of history and knowledge. Unlike Reggie, Anne excelled in documenting this history and knowledge, with the result that FeV has become internationally influential, particularly in Francophone cities in Europe and Africa.

As is the case for WPT and WPN, FeV never underwent a formal evaluation of either the organization or its projects. This is particularly regrettable, given the practice-oriented research focus of the work. Having said that, neighbourhood improvements to the built and social environments, as the result of safety audits and local women's safety committees, have been extensive. As in Toronto, an emphasis on improving public transit amenities, frequency and safety led to concrete achievements, such as a night-time request stop programme in both cities and renovation of several subway stations. It is impossible to evaluate its impact on other initiatives, but FeV was the lead in developing the international organization Women in Cities, and its toolkits have been adapted by regional initiatives in Latin America and the Caribbean. Moreover, FeV created an embedded femocracy which has proven relatively resilient to political changes, both in terms of parties in power and municipal restructuring as a result of amalgamation. However, the ingredients of this success may not be easily replicable. These include: a socially progressive municipal government at the start of its existence, anxious to make a strong statement on gender; then a socially progressive provincial government throughout much of the 1990s willing to expand the organization's focus beyond the local level; a focus on devolving urban planning to the neighbourhood level, which helped embed gender mainstreaming at its most concrete and immediate level; strong advocacy by feminist organizations willing to support this femocratic initiative; research capacity and interest in local academic institutions; and proactive and relatively stable leadership by Anne and a group of colleagues drawn from local politics, academe and feminist organizations.

Women's Design Service: From Inside to Outside and Back Again

Like all three of the organizations described thus far, Women's Design Service (WDS) was created because a group of feminist planners (including in this case, a number of architects and urban designers as well) felt themselves to be discriminated against in their profession, and moreover, felt that the needs of women were being largely ignored within planning and associated professions (Walker & Cavanagh, 1999; also Wendy Davis, personal communication). In 1985, as part of the Women Plan London consultations and policy outcomes described earlier, WDS received an initial grant from the Greater London Council to support feminist urban planning and design interventions. The following year, the GLC was abolished by the Conservative national government of Margaret Thatcher, leaving 32 local governments in this metropolitan area of 7.7 million operating mostly independently from one another. Women's Design Service was able to put together funding from other sources, including the London Boroughs' Grant Scheme, the national government and several charitable organizations.

Over the past 20 years, WDS has published a remarkable range and number of reports on design and planning, from guidelines for crèches in shopping centres, to improving playgrounds for under-sevens; from research on public toilets (a recurrent issue for women because of biological differences from men as well as social considerations of being caregivers), to office accessibility.1 Once the Labour Party took power nationally in 1997, WDS developed a series of projects on urban regeneration, using safety audits and other mechanisms to reinforce local women's participation in these neighbourhood improvement initiatives. The organization was also involved (together with a now-defunct feminist architects' collective, Matrix) in developing a part-time vocational course for women, leading to architecture and other design practices, building technology and surveying, in the early 1990s. As part of this project, there were attempts to recruit and support Asian and African origin women into planning and design professions (Walker & Cavanagh, 1999). Women's Design Service, unlike the other organizations profiled, has always had a diverse membership (both staff and management committees) in terms of ethnicity, sexuality and age.

In contrast to the three other organizations, WDS has changed its management structure over time. Originally, the organization operated as a co-operative, with four staff being paid the same salaries, and both staff and trustees making decisions. By 1995, this structure had been rejected as inefficient, and a Director was appointed. Also in contrast to the other organizations profiled, WDS operated as a consultancy, delivering research and other reports to local governments and regeneration agencies in return for funding. WDS operated on a project by project basis, as core funding does not interest many grant giving bodies. As funding for the organization's specific feminist planning objectives became increasingly difficult to access there was a concern about “funding drift” (paying more attention to funding sources than to the mandate of the organization), to the point where in 2002 WDS seemed on the verge of dissolution. Only a last minute influx of regeneration grants saved the day, followed by “regeneration” of the trustees, with new ideas and connections to local initiatives. The organization is now focusing on becoming more of a social enterprise, generating and marketing more of its own projects around gender issues, and developing ongoing relationships with redevelopment projects in Bristol and Manchester as well as London (Wendy Davis, personal communication).

In part, regeneration of the initiative has been supported by changing political structures within London and the UK. Although WDS has carried out consultancies throughout England, it is based in London and its political fortunes have ebbed and flowed with the metropolitan governance structures. In 2000, a metropolitan governance structure was reinstated. The Greater London Authority (GLA), and the election of Ken Livingstone, the former head of the Greater London Council, as mayor heralded a resurgence of feminist activism. More women were elected to both local councils and the GLA, and a powerful policy advisor on women's issues, Anni Marjoram, was hired by Livingstone to develop gender mainstreaming initiatives within the departments under the remit of the metropolitan authority: police, fire, transport and economic development, and to establish a Domestic Violence Co-ordination Strategy. As part of this gender mainstreaming initiative, an annual conference called Capitalwoman has attracted a growing number of participants, rising to more than 2500 in 2005. The London regional plan, released in 2004, included specific mention of women's needs in relation to public transportation, childcare, urban safety and employment and training policies (Bashevkin, 2005).

Women's Design Service played a role in “carrying the torch” for diversity issues within urban planning during the relatively dry years in London between the abolition of the GLC in 1986 and the reinstatement of metropolitan government 14 years later. In the late 1990s, it co-ordinated a London Women and Planning Forum, which, like Women's Planning Network in Melbourne, provided opportunities for exchange of information and professional support to professional women working for and with local government (Walker & Cavanagh, 1999). In recent years, a resurgence of funding at the local level for women and planning initiatives has led to two national conferences in 2005, on women and urban regeneration, and on making places safer (www.wds.org.uk). The organization has been successful in expanding its sources of funding, receiving grants from private charitable organizations like Comic Relief and the Bridge House Trust as well as national and local governments.

Unlike the three other organizations profiled, WDS has engaged an organization called Social Enterprise London to generate an external evaluation of its projects and of the organization itself (personal communication, Wendy Davis). According to WDS, its most effective legacy is its design guidelines and other research publications, which have been influential in shaping urban planning and design practices, not only in the UK but internationally. Their work with neighbourhood women on regeneration has created concrete improvements at the local level, and also provided a model of consultation with marginalized populations. In this case study in particular, it can be said that WDS's sustainability over time is a success in and of itself, particularly since its publications dating from the late 1980s are still relevant and useful today, and continue to be distributed through the same organization. Women's Design Service stands as a successful model of how an organization can change staff and membership over time, while still remaining true to its original vision.

Conclusion: Longevity, Change and Success in Feminist Planning Organizations

This article steps back from usual questions about feminist planning theory, interventions and critiques, and looks instead at the organizational issues of how feminist initiatives sustain themselves, and undergo necessary changes, over time. The four case studies chosen represent four different models of organization: an overtly feminist advocacy group operating as a collective, a femocratic local government initiative, a professional women's organization with liberal feminist equity-seeking goals, and a non-profit feminist consultancy that moved from a collective to a more hierarchical structure. All have been defined as feminist planning organizations, using the rather generous definition of an organization promoting the equity and advancement of women (Martin, 1990; Riger, 1994; Staehili, 2004), in this case covering the advancement of women within the planning profession, the inclusion of women within planning and design processes and policies, and an explicit commitment to gender-disaggregated data analysis and evaluation of outcomes. Based on this very small sample, and given the different contexts in which these organizations have operated, the intent is not to identify one model as more successful than another. Rather, the intent is to seek commonalities and contrasts between the four histories, in order to discover factors that seem to be significant in supporting or undermining feminist planning organizations over the long haul.

The four organizations have taken on very similar issues in relation to gender and planning: public transportation, affordable housing, safety in homes and on the streets, childcare and other community services, urban intensification and regeneration, and the design and land use mix of home, work and leisure activities. They have also investigated a similar range of mechanisms to effect change: using participatory consultation methods, increasing the number of women in local politics and senior planning positions, inclusion of women's needs in both neighbourhood and regional planning documents, and latterly, gender mainstreaming of local governance, policy and funding mechanisms. Women's Design Service would appear to have taken the most comprehensive approach to including grounds of difference other than gender, with attempts to increase the range as well as the number of women in planning-related professions.

Where the four organizations diverge is in the way they carried out the business of helping planning respond to diversity. To return to the evaluation framework described earlier, success can occur in relation to at least four different goals: achieving policy objectives, organizational survival, building a resource base for further organizing, and challenging patriarchal ideas and norms. All of these organizations, to some extent, have been successful in achieving at least some of these goals (see Table 2).

Table 2. A comparison of four feminist planning organizations' successes

Goal	WPT	WPN	FeV	WPN
Achievement of policy objectives (goods, services, policies, programmes)	Active in local and regional planning consultation and advocacy from a feminist perspective for 15 years; some early success in policy and governance; Research and policy analysis publications (now difficult to find) have had some international influence	Creation of network, research publications and regular newsletter, plus mentoring, scholarship, professional development, involvement in women and local governance coalition, has had some influence on advancement of women planners and decision makers. Little direct influence or involvement in governance and planning policy issues	Successfully entrenched “women's issues” (affordable housing, childcare, safety) within city's planning agenda; created a plethora of neighbourhood, city-wide, provincial, national, and international projects and products around women's safety concerns; materials used internationally	Active locally and nationally in developing feminist planning and design products and publications, training opportunities, projects; publications have been used nationally and internationally
Organizational adaptation and survival (sustainable planning mechanisms and organizations)	Project funding, but no core funding: organization always struggled to remain viable; now defunct	Continued core funding; growing membership base	Entrenched within city's bureaucracy; some doubt about renewal after recent governance changes	Successful funding and organizational renewal
Building a resource base for future organizing (better informed planners and institutions)	Influence on some local planners and community activists, unsuccessful in maintaining interest and diversity in younger generation	Renewal by younger generation of planners, diversity still not particularly addressed within organization	Successful in building links with community organizations and researchers, but very much centred on one “leader”. Community support now in question	Successful in building links with other organizations, and training a more diverse group of practitioners
Challenging patriarchal ideas and norms (policies, analysis, governance, theory)	Early successes in local governance have not been sustained; although Toronto Women's Call to Action may continue legacy	Success in being “player around table”, but not particularly advocacy oriented	Some mechanisms (e.g. neighbourhood women's safety audits) appear entrenched, and products have been influential nationally and internationally	Gender mainstreaming appears entrenched in London and UK (due to large network of which WDS is but one part)

In terms of policy objectives, the aims of the four organizations were quite different. Women Plan Toronto began as a consultation exercise, and sought to increase the number and diversity of voices involved in local planning discourse. They were somewhat successful in writing up results, and getting written about, and they did influence a number of younger planners over their 20-year history. However, membership was never very large or diverse, funding was never secure, and embedding a feminist or gender mainstreaming perspective within local or metropolitan planning and governance remained an elusive goal. Women's Planning Network sought to support women planners, as well as advance the recognition of gender analysis in planning issues such as community safety and local governance reform. They have been highly successful in expanding membership, and securing funding, but their impact on policies or governance structures within Melbourne or Victoria appears to have been limited. Femmes et Ville sought to embed a feminist perspective within local planning and governance, and were successful in developing programmes, policies, and projects, particularly in relation to women's safety issues. They were very successful in documenting their practice, and also appear to have inspired other initiatives, but like Women Plan Toronto, the organization was overly dependent on one key person. The Women's Design Service sought to support feminist interventions in planning and design within London. They have been successful in replenishing membership and funding, and have expanded their scope beyond the metropolitan area. The current success in London of embedding gender within local planning and governance is a product of larger forces than one organization, but still stands as a considerable joint achievement of a changed local environment.

In relation to scale or level of intervention, there is a constant tension between very concrete and small-scale interventions which can lead to measurable outcomes, such as women's safety audits used by WPT, FeV, and WDS, and more generalized attempts to change policies and structures. A strength of the Montréal FeV initiative, and latterly of the WDS, is its embeddedness in neighbourhood planning practices, particularly within urban regeneration initiatives. Femmes et Ville and the Women's Design Service have also been able to jump scales successfully, moving into national and international networking from a local base.

The aspect of feminist planning change that all of these initiatives has found most difficult is embedding a gendered analysis into urban planning and local or metropolitan governance, through mechanisms such as a standing women's committee, or a gender analysis within neighbourhood or regional plans. Women's Design Service operated for most of its 20 years without a women's committee at the metropolitan London level, simply because there was no metropolitan London government from 1986 to 2000. Melbourne's WPN has perhaps been hampered by the absence of a centralized metropolitan government structure, as well as the legacy of the remarkably undemocratic local governance changes of the mid-1990s. But its mutually supportive relationship with the state Planning Ministry has not led to explicit policy changes in terms of Melbourne 2030, the regional plan, or gender mainstreaming more generally. Women Plan Toronto repeatedly hit a brick wall in its attempts to move from an organization that planners consulted to an organization that helped embed structural change. The City of Toronto had an unsuccessful Women's Committee and its Safe City Committee, which operated from a feminist perspective, did not outlast amalgamation. Women's committees have been generally been difficult to maintain throughout Canada (Whitzman, 2002) and the UK (Little, 1994). Femmes et Ville's initial rapid success was remarkable. However, it is too soon to evaluate the impact of the transformed FeV initiative in Montréal on planning in that city-region, particularly since a new round of municipal de-amalgamations occurred in 2005.

The four initiatives are most diverse in terms of where they fall along the mainstreaming/disengagement continuum. Obviously, Montréal's initiative was the most embedded in the structures of governance. However, a hallmark of this initiative was the balance developed between external advocacy through CAFSU, a committee made up of feminist community organizations, and the FeV initiative itself. This allowed a more critical analysis to be developed than would otherwise be the case for a femocratic initiative. Femmes et Ville and Melbourne's Women's Planning Network both benefited from stable although limited government funding, while remaining separate entities in terms of day-to-day operations. Femmes et Ville was also successful in generating senior government funding, particularly from the federal government Status of Women office, and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. In contrast, WDS and WPT took quite different routes in terms of supporting their independent organizations. Women's Design Service, although a registered charity, was highly entrepreneurial in its fundraising for consultancies. It benefited from the change in national government from Conservative to Labour in 1997, although it had to renew its board and mandate to fully take advantage of the new funding landscape. Women Plan Toronto took the most oppositional stance to local government, advocating for what it identified as the planning needs of grassroots women while undertaking projects funded by senior governments. This led to an organization supposedly not beholden to any state structure or group of individuals, but also incapable of financially or organizationally sustaining itself over the long haul.

Overall, the question of relative success is difficult to determine. With the exception of WDS, none of these organizations has undergone an external evaluation of its projects or of the organization itself. Aside from the planning interventions noted above, longevity itself has considerable virtues, especially since it takes some time for an organization to become known and trusted locally, and also to develop networks both locally and internationally. Women's Design Service and FeV have been most successful in documenting their practice, although the Women's Planning Network also has a range of publications and a website. Organizationally, WDS and WPN have managed to replenish their membership over time, and get younger women interested in keeping feminist planning alive. Femmes et Ville and WDS have both been successful in attracting a range of funding sources, although FeV and WPN are both dependent on one core source of funding, their local and state governments respectively.

In terms of challenges that lie ahead for feminist planning, the four interviewees were unanimous: an international attitude, particularly in rich countries, that insists “we are all equal now” in the face of continuing economic and social inequalities; the changing role of local governance and privatization of many planning goods and processes (such as public transportation) leading to less meaningful participation in general; and the continuing challenge of sustaining organizations that take an oppositional stance to “business as usual”. Given the various commonalities between these four organizations, the questions of how feminist organizations learn from one another, how to measure their successes and learn from their failures, in varying but not entirely dissimilar contexts, becomes a challenge for researchers concerned with real life planning practice, and the theory deriving from that practice.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Wendy Davis, Roz Hansen, Anne Michaud and Regula (Reggie) Modlich, for the time they put into their interviews and also for pointing to resources about their organizations. Travel assistance from the Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand is gratefully appreciated in supporting the research for this article. Thanks are also due to the three anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments on the draft article.

Notes

1. To order publications, see WDS website: http://www.wds.org.uk/