The initial approaches to the issues of the city and architecture that emerged from the development of the women's movement in the 1960s and 1970s set as a framework for investigation the relationship between woman-space, woman-city, woman-home, aiming to re-examine the approaches and theories of space from a feminist perspective.
Thus, the establishment of this alternative "viewpoint" on spatial issues explored the impacts of social inequality between the two sexes, both in the theories and practices of urban planning and architecture. The central working assumption was that the structuring of space has so far been based on the secondary role of women, in ways that have constituted one of the elements that constructed this very inequality, not merely reflecting it but reproducing it.
Where does this reflection stand today? Has the male-centric character of architecture and urban planning been overturned? Today, are we only talking about the highlighting of the female perspective on spatial issues or are we also discussing the gender of architecture? But what does this theoretical shift mean and what does it entail? This shift became possible when the gendered nature of ideas and scientific theories became understood, as well as the specific ways in which scientific discourse and the cognitive objects of all scientific fields, including architecture, have been constructed.
The question, therefore, concerns how gender-based social inequalities have affected both architectural thought and architectural discourse. Does architecture have a gendered aspect? And if so, how does this affect its symbolic and evaluative systems, the ways it structures its central concepts, and its design tools?
How has the social construction of gender identities, which ascribe different meanings, contents, and values to the concepts of male and female, influenced architectural thought and practice? The outlining of the approaches that have been developed so far regarding these questions is a necessary reference framework that allows for the recording of the path that the concept of gender has taken in its encounter with architecture and urban space theories. Furthermore, it is a necessary condition for the comparative accounting of this journey in Greece.
