Has a Male Architect Been Able to Incorporate a Gender Perspective into Space?: A Case Study of a Social Housing Project, the South Block of Haitaun Kitagata in Japan

Abstract

Within interdisciplinary space studies (geography, urban sociology, architecture, etc.) in Japan, since the mid-1990s men have increasingly recognized that gender perspectives are important. It is, however, questionable whether men sufficiently recognize their gender positionality, the recognition of which is indispensable to a gender perspective. In this paper, I highlight this problem by taking the example of a social housing project, the South Block of Haitaun Kitagata in Gifu Prefecture, Japan. The South Block of Haitaun Kitagata is a large-scale social housing estate designed by a male architect, Arata Isozaki, in the latter half of the 1990s. He tried to raise the quality of amenities by adopting a gender perspective and to this end appointed exclusively female designers (four Japanese and three non-Japanese). I have examined to what extent he was able to incorporate successfully a gender perspective into this housing project from four standpointsU the architect himself, the residents, the female designers, and the prefectural government of Gifu. First, I examined Isozaki's perception of gender issues as expressed in Japanese architecture journals. It became obvious that for him a gender perspective was simply a female one. Hence, he merely expected the female architects to incorporate a gender perspective into the building design, without thinking about his own gender positionality. There was, however, no critical discussion pointing out this problem, even though the building exterior and the concept's uniqueness were commented upon with keen interest in Japanese architectural circles. Second, through a questionnaire and interviews targeting the residents, it became clear that this housing project had some problems in relation to its amenities. The residents expressed disappointment at the quality of the amenities and attributed this to a lack of feminity in the female designers. This is because they had expected that female architects would place greater importance on amenities for daily living than male architects, due to their feminity. Third, I examined the ideas of the female designers as articulated through their discourses in Japanese architectural journals. I found that the female designers placed heavy emphasis on the building exterior instead of on amenities for the residents. This means that they had not played the female gender role expected by the male architect. Fourth, I explored how the prefectural government of Gifu, which is in charge of the management of this housing project, contributed to its construction. It became clear that the male governor of the prefecture had accepted the gender plan of the male architect on the basis of public building policy, rather than on the basis of gender-affirmative policies. In conclusion, the South Block of Haitaun Kitagata failed to incorporate a design based on a gender perspective and thus ended up being built based upon a design with the conventional male logic. This was because men tend simply to think of gender perspectives as only female concepts and thus are likely to neglect the issue of male positionality when incorporating gender perspectives into space. Thus it becomes obvious that gender perspectives are still not fully understood by men in Japanese space studies.