Violence against women in Delhi: a sustainability problematic

Violence against women (VAW) has traditionally been of concern to feminists and cultural sociologists, and in recent decades, has also begun to be diagnosed and understood as a development problem. However, 20 women practitioners and scholars of development in Delhi have raised this issue explicitly as a sustainability problem while referring to the high rate of gender violence in the city’s public spaces. Sustainability is one of the most problematic political notions and scholars have been justifiably concerned that it has been hijacked to legitimise a variety of agendas, including unsustainable ones that contravene principles of social justice. However, it is also a compelling and powerful political concept and therefore, it is important to reconceptualise and reclaim from a feminist perspective, and from within the theoretical and empirical framework of equity, one of the central tenets of sustainability, and social justice. Therefore in this article, employing the primary research from Delhi, I use the notion of equity to frame the VAW in the city as a sustainability problem—the lack of which has an impact on urban design, which can constrain a city’s capacity to be sustainable.