Exploring the segregation of commercial land use by gender in the city centre of Biskra, Algeria

Abstract

Gender segregation is considered a significant problem in the modern period, where urban planning may play a role in facilitating male and female use of public spaces, or overlook their different needs in the city. Urban spatial use has been linked to many factors in previous studies. One important factor to consider here is the pattern of land-use and its capability of affecting the movement behaviour of people in the city. In space syntax theory, it has been assumed that the distribution of shops exists to take advantage of people’s movement, which is generated by the urban structure itself. In this regard, this paper aims to identify the factors behind land-use segregation between shops for each gender in the city centre of Biskra, and whether this has resulted in gender segregation in urban spatial use, leading to the distinct location of services within the city centre, creating men’s and women’s spaces. This investigation has been conducted by using surveys of shops as well as syntactic analyses, paired together in order to reach an understanding of this phenomenon. The findings showed that at a global scale, the higher the street is integrated, the higher the land-use mixture tends to be, while at a local scale there was no correlation found in term of men’s and women’s segregation of land-use, which may rather be related to locals using their prior knowledge of a space rather than the information cues provided by its structure.