This Barcelona cooperative of architects, geographers and sociologists argues that the functionally zoned, commute-based city was built around a male productive worker and renders care work invisible, so everyday life must become the unit of design. Their method starts from the four spheres of daily activity - productive, reproductive, personal and community - and from lived experience gathered through exploratory walks, night audits and participatory mapping with women, carers, children and older people. Concrete criteria follow: proximity and mix of uses, vitality and visibility for perceived safety, continuous accessible pavements, safe and legible public transport, laundries, playgrounds and community rooms treated as infrastructure, and interior courtyards and shared circulation designed for supervision and sociability. The book frames this as a radical transformation of the spaces of life rather than a checklist of add-ons.
It consolidated feminist urbanism from critique into a transferable methodology now embedded in Spanish and Latin American practice - Barcelona's superblocks and gender-mainstreamed street audits, Bogota's care blocks, Vienna's longer tradition of gender planning - and in municipal design guidance. It also reframed proximity thinking, giving the 15-minute city and care-city agendas an explicit account of whose time and whose unpaid work the compact city is meant to serve.
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