EXPERIENCES OF THE EUROFEM – GENDER AND HUMAN SETTLEMENTS NETWORK

Liisa Horelli, PhD, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland. Liisa.Horelli@hut.fi

www.eurofem.net

EuroFEM is a network of projects and policy, which has gradually grown into a transnational arena for finding new solutions and forms of action in the field of human settlements. European women interested in planning issues had the opportunity to meet one another in several international conferences, in 1994, which led to the founding of the EuroFEM – Gender and Human Settlements network. Supported both by the European Commission and the Finnish Ministry of the Environment, it held the first international conference in Hämeenlinna, Finland, in 1998. The event gathered 300 grassroots, women entrepreneurs, researchers, administrators, and politicians from all over the world.

Although the participants came from diverse backgrounds and cultures, women shared a common interest, namely the collaborative creation of an infrastructure for everyday life. The latter comprises the planning and development of supportive networks of environmentally friendly housing, local services, transport systems, and employment in the localities and the region.

The aim of this presentation is to display the results and impact of the network as well as to discuss the future challenges. The results of the EuroFEM-network and the 60 projects involved in it have been both material (co-housing examples in Sweden), ecological, (environmental protection in the Netherlands), economic (job creation within women´s resource centres in Finland and Sweden), social (residential services in the UK), psychological (programmes for supporting ones self-esteem, in Italy), organisational (new networking organisations), and methodological. The EuroFEM toolkit for Mobilising Women into Local and Regional Development, which has also been translated into French, contains some fifty tools for capacity building in collaborative planning, including the Italian speciality of time planning.

Perhaps the greatest impact of the network has been the gendering of EU structural policy. The collaboration of EuroFEM-members with the gatekeeper women of the Commission resulted in the organising of four conferences on how to mainstream structural fund policy, in several evaluations of structural fund interventions from the gender perspective, in EU-funded interregional women´s resource centres, some of which are Italian. EuroFEM also participated in the group of experts, whose task was to mainstream the new Regulations on Structural Funds for the period 2000-2006. The latter now affect the partnership formation and the content of structural fund programmes, and hence regional development in the EU countries.

The future challenges for EuroFEM are both practical and political. They concern, above all, the implementation of new cases of supportive human settlements, in varying contexts, which will lead to a viable and exciting everyday life.