Restructuring large housing estates: does gender matter in urban development and governance?

Large-scale housing estates all over Europe currently experience fundamental structural changes. Presuming that urban governance needs to be gender-sensitive to be equitable, sustainable and effective, the paper tries to understand firstly if mainstreaming gender is an important issue for the restructuring of large housing estates and current urban and estate development policies and secondly if the implementation of the top-down Gender Mainstreaming strategy has an impact on local governance. Following a brief explanation of the gender terminology and its adoption in urban planning and governance, the paper tries to reveal the compatibility of Gender Mainstreaming and Healey¿s concept of Collaborative Planning. Mainly from a German perspective, but also including Swedish and Italian emblematic examples and thus different structural frameworks for the implementation of gender mainstreaming, we discuss the gender-sensitiveness (or ¿blindness) of urban and estate development in large housing estates.