How to Cite: Gómez Lobo, Noemí and Diego Martín Sánchez. "Non-binary Learning: a Series of Design Studios for an Ecofeminist Pedagogy". Dearq no. 41 (2025): 115-124. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18389/dearq41.2025.04
How to Cite: Gómez Lobo, Noemí and Diego Martín Sánchez. "Non-binary Learning: a Series of Design Studios for an Ecofeminist Pedagogy". Dearq no. 41 (2025): 115-124. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18389/dearq41.2025.04
Noemí Gómez Lobo
Universidad Rey Juan Carlos de Madrid, Spain*
Diego Martín Sánchez
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain**
Received: December 1, 2023 | Accepted: June 14, 2024
Fostering diversity in schools of architecture and urban planning can be achieved not only by improving quotas and establishing much-needed positive actions, but also by preparing curricula, teaching methodologies and themes for learning about how to regenerate more just and inclusive environments that address the dual climate and social crises. The aim of a series of design studios run at different universities in Tokyo between 2020 and 2022 was to re-read the city and its architectures from a gender perspective that challenges binary assumptions and includes an awareness of the more-than-human. This article reviews the theoretical frameworks used in the studios to discuss how an ecofeminist pedagogy can establish cross-scale, multifunctional projects that challenge the assumption of division.
Keywords: Non-binary city, ecofeminism, architectural design, urban design, gender perspective, Japan.
The multidimensional crisis that occupies urban agendas, media coverage, university curricula, architectural festivals and governmental programs has already met its proactive alternative: ecofeminism. Thinking about future urbanisms and architectures, designers and planners must be mindful of the biodiversity and care crisis that the planet is currently experiencing. There is an urgency to address this current paradigm and reject escapist positions (Laurino and Cireddu 2023). The endless growth discourses of the twentieth century are long outdated. Nowadays, to claim that a piece of architecture is ostensibly free of political baggage, an innocent formal exercise or a mere intellectual virtuosity, seems naïve (Muxí and Montaner 2023). Environmental actions must be accountable to the social and ecological layers with which they are inevitably enmeshed. However, this situation should not hinder the creative capacity of courses offered at architectural schools. Moreover, a crisis model requires not only complexity in our diagnoses, showing what has been ignored, but also value potential forces that break intricate conventions with the aim of improving our common habitat.
In this endeavor, feminist scholars have discussed gender as a social construct, revealing the set of expectations associated with biological sex, always in relation to its temporal and geographical context (Puleo 2011). Learning from the social sciences, including ethnography and anthropology, the field of architecture has incorporated gender questions in spatial production, finding that stereotyped behaviors affect the entire ecology of life, from the urban environment to the domestic (Muxí 2018). This eco-dependent condition not only affects human life but has a direct impact on all living creatures in the planetary habitat (Pascual and Herrero 2010). Françoise d'Eaubonne (1920-2005) evoked a synthesis of ecologism and feminism to identify the intersection of capitalist and patriarchal power dynamics and their dominion over nature and women. The term ecofeminism, which appears in her 1974 book Le féminisme ou la mort (Feminism or Death), denounces the overexploitation of nature that entails controlling bodies and territories (Migliaro 2021). D'Eaubonne deals with the non-binary condition in sexuality, her book outlines a fruitful epistemological framework for conceptualizing spatial practices. It is not a question of limiting women to the natural realm, but of displacing men and production from the center in order to focus on care and life-sustaining actions.
Within the vision of constructivist ecofeminism, Yayo Herrero (2023) mentions that there is no production without reproduction and vice versa: the care required of women is the basis of capitalist surplus and social reproduction. She recalls that by separating production from reproduction, patriarchy has created a false freedom that ignores ecological parameters. Worldwide, the COVID-19 crisis demonstrated that gender inequalities in the performance of daily tasks were not a phenomenon of the past, but only exacerbated existing deficiencies in our built environment. Our housing was ill-equipped to accommodate remote workplaces, and urban zoning had dramatic consequences for those who needed to meet basic needs. At the same time, the virus taught us to question 'normality' as a permanent condition (Herrero and Gago 2023). In a kind of emergency drill, human frenzy subsided, and environmental conditions improved, producing better air quality and improved conditions for wildlife or pollination.
Critical times should help us to think critically about our living environment. The pandemic provided the catalyst for a series of architectural master's studios to rediscover the hierarchical premises that shape a megacity. In six semesters between 2020 and 2022, we explored the intersections between gender, care, the more-than-human and the city, towards the establishment of a post-COVID Tokyo. Using the domestic, the urban and the landscape as case studies, this paper takes the theoretical framework of ecofeminism and applies it to reviewing the pedagogy undertaken in these courses. Although the scales and themes differed, they all followed the same methodology: at the beginning of the course, a brief socio-ecological survey identified the binarisms implicit in the urban-architectural typologies to be redesigned; the identification of a key barrier that marks the binary and, finally, the proposal of strategies to overcome this condition, arriving finally at a non-binary architecture that blurs the imposed limits of the productive and the reproductive.
All the studios focused on intertwining research and design, facing the creative challenge of disturbing the existing power relations that configure the modern city. To overcome exhausted binary models, students identified the flaws and potentialities latent in the urban realm, enhancing the ecosystem of livelihoods that occurs in Tokyo. In the design studios, learning from existing livelihood patterns, diagnosing architectural typologies, and using ecofeminist notions on commoning, we took inspiration from Silvia Federici's who spoke of "Reconnecting with this history (of reproductive work) is today for women and men a crucial step, both for undoing the gendered architecture of our lives and reconstructing our homes and lives as commons" (Federici 2018).
Taking the domestic realm as their starting point, two master's studios focused on the design of single-family houses, a fundamental minimum unit in the landscape of the city. Cleaning, cooking, washing, and drying clothes are daily activities related to the home. This set of tasks, conventionally known as housework (kaji), along with caring for children and grandparents, have been stereotypically assigned to women, consolidating over time an imaginary of domesticity that equates with that of femininity. Gender norms have become gendered forms, and the typology of the house and its layout illustrate how social preconceptions materialize in spatial configurations. Although the persistence of gender roles may seem an obsolete model in a contemporary and dynamic city like Tokyo, recent statistics show that most domestic work is still performed by women. In the course we discussed house design from a gender perspective, questioning embedded spatial codes. As architects, how can we correct the imbalances of outdated models? How can we reinvent the domestic space by paying attention to care? How can we design a house in which reproductive and productive practices coexist?
Miho Hamaguchi addressed these questions as early as 1949 in her seminal book The Feudalism of Japanese Houses (Hamaguchi 1949), claiming that the Japanese house was an essential element in improving the position of women as part of a move towards real democratization after World War II. Japan experienced a clear division between working and living, encompassing gender assignments. As in western contexts, the Japanese postwar housewife oversaw all the care activities, framing the house as the woman's realm—previously a productive unit for the working class—and a representational asset for the upper bourgeoisie (the samurai elite). In Hamaguchi's vision, equality could only be achieved by rethinking the rituals of patriarchal status and abandoning the hierarchical system of the feudal era, deeply rooted in domestic spatial articulation. The studio kick-off discussed key essential questions for shaking the foundations of what is taken for granted: is house design free of gender assumptions, or is the architect, when thinking about dwelling, projecting social codes into spatial configurations?
Figure_1 Syllabus covers of the different design studios discussed in this article. Source: the author.
During Japan's period of sustained economic growth, house design was accompanied by an imaginary of the nuclear family and, therefore, by the gender roles played by each member of the household. At the start of the twenty-first century, more than half of the population in Japan lives in this conventional family format, comprised of parents with few children. Still, new family types are also part of the social fabric (Tsukamoto 2017). As the feminist thinker and sociologist Chizuko Ueno reminds us (2002), despite greater diversity, house design is oftentimes outdated in the spatial relations it proposes. It often follows an inherited "nLDK" rhetoric ("n" for the number of bedrooms, "L" for the living room, "DK" for dining-kitchen) that restricts the possibilities of living and privileges some activities while hiding others. In Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture, Hilde Heynen and Gülsüm Baydar point out that "[t]hese 'discursive forces' are themselves sustained and supported through the spatial patterns in which they have crystallized" (Heynen and Baydar 2005, 24). Spatial elements such as the 'master bedroom', the 'rational kitchen' or 'the study' do have implications in terms of gender, since their unproblematized presence and naming in the home underscores the expectance that it will be inhabited by a married couple, with the wife an expert cook and the husband keen on his privacy." Following this approach, we thought about designing a house focusing on—but not limited to—three gender-charged rooms in the Japanese house: kitchen, master bedroom and study.
Other media formats accompany the key texts to better imagine the realities of the nuclear family in Japan over time. From comedy to drama, with the home as the main stage, a list of recommended films was added to the syllabus to develop a sociological X-ray focused on a critical analysis of the gender roles that each family member plays in the domestic space: Yasujiro Ozu, Tokyo monogatari (1953); Yoshimitsu Morita, Kazoku Gemu (1983); Gakuryu Ishii, Gyakufunsha kazoku (1984); Naomi Kawase, Ni tsutsumarete (1992); Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Tokyo Sonata (2008); Miwa Nishikawa, Nagai iiwake (2016).
Figure 2_ Gender-free house studio. "New form of marriage" proposal by Sota Maeda. 2020. Professors: Noemí Gómez Lobo and Fuminori Nousaku.
Each student thought about diverse groups and individuals in the community: a working couple with two children, for example, a grandmother, a college student with pets, a single mother with her baby, or a queer couple. The projects subverted assumptions by challenging the relationships of sequence and visibility between the key gender-charged spaces, and rethinking design according to new family types, subverting the life-work balance crystallized in contemporary Japanese society. The students' projects approached house design from a revealing viewpoint involving the power dynamics implicit in residential architecture, challenging hidden constructions, and re-imagining new ways of living towards a gender-free house.
Figure 3_ Models and panel presentation of "House-work: forms of gender free living", 2021. Professors: Noemí Gómez Lobo and Fuminori Nousaku.
The pandemic prompted an urgent rethinking of our deepest assumptions about how productive and reproductive behaviors unfold in our cities. The first of the studio series, "Non-binary City: working-living hybrids in Tokyo"1(2020), was conducted entirely online with Masatoshi Hirai at Hosei University, and responded to the situation of confinement in which the city was at the time immersed. Launching the studio with the image of the office building cubicles in Jacques Tati's film "Playtime" and an aerial photograph of suburban houses in Levittown, an uncanny feeling entered the classroom. While strangely familiar, both are incredibly artificial. They represent a modern invention, the severance between working and living. While extremely foreign, what they show is ubiquitous in neoliberal economies (Spain 1992). Both images speak of a highly orchestrated way of life, two different spheres that may occur simultaneously but separately. They represent the result of social, political, and economic systems materialized in building typologies and urban fabrics. They synthesize one of the essential premises of the twentieth century paradigm, namely the division of labor. Paraphrasing Dolores Hayden (1980), the central question of the studio arises: What would a non-binary city be like?
Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria Shéhérazade Giudici (2019) ground the explanation of this split on the notion of property that labels things as private or public, leaving out the intermediate states connected to community practices. Nomadic life encouraged people to organize in networks, but when settlements formed, the social structure became increasingly hierarchical. This politics of property began to materialize in elements such as walls, fences, or partitions, marking clear boundaries. Functions were segregated, associating productive work as profitable business and reproductive life as activities related to care. In the words of Aureli and Giudici, "the gendered division of labor was reinforced by the internal subdivision of the house in which male-dominated rituals of hospitality were clearly separated from female-led reproductive activities". Tokyo is no different from this story. After World War II, rapid economic growth introduced new roles of modernity, embodied in the well-known salaryman and housemaker. The former belonged to the working sphere, commuting daily on crowded trains to high-rise offices in corporate centers. The latter was assigned to the domestic sphere, staying in residential neighborhoods, taking care of the children, and riding her mamachari bicycle to the grocery store. Although the twenty-first century has brought alternative lifestyles beyond the rigidity of this stereotype, urbanism and architecture are still shaped by the assumption of division.
Modern urban planning split the city according to economic activities, distributing different labor patterns across the territory. While corporate and industrial hubs relate to a male-charged workforce dedicated to business, logistics, construction and manufacturing industries (white- and blue-collar sectors); residential and commercial areas correspond to a female-charged workforce dedicated to domestic duties, care, service and the entertainment industries (pink-collar sector). Gender-charged work is inscribed in the geographies of Tokyo and articulated by the commuter train system in which the JR Yamanote Line functions as a soft border (Koh, Tsukamoto and Nishizawa 2010). Accordingly, students selected two locations: a working place (a site within the business district inside the Yamanote Line), and a living place (a site within the suburban residential area outside the Yamanote Line).
Figure 4_ Non-binary city: working-living hybrids in Tokyo. "Hacking the suburbs" proposal by Nana Kibuchi. 2020. Professors: Noemí Gómez Lobo and Masatoshi Hirai.
In the next studio, "Non-binary city: Tokyo Livelihoods after COVID-19" (2020), we continued working with the division of labor as one of the key premises of the twentieth century paradigm. To the well-known binaries of the modern era (women/men, private/public, inside/outside, nature/culture), the pandemic added a new binary related to work: essential/non-essential. Despite presenting nuances according to each country, 'essential work' is commonly understood as those activities that are deemed necessary for the maintenance of life. This definition resonates with Hannah Arendt's political notions of 'labor' versus 'work' (Arendt 1958) and Ivan Illich's concepts of 'wage work' versus 'shadow work' (Illich 1980). According to Arendt, 'labor' corresponds to the bodily related actions that sustain life (humans as animal laborans), while 'work' refers to those occupations based on artificial constructions that transcend sheer need (humans as homo faber). For Illich 'shadow work' is a capitalist malaise that refers to "unpaid servitude" that "does not contribute to subsistence" caused by an "unprecedented economic division of the sexes" (Illich 1980, 107).
Figure 5_ Non-binary city studio: Tokyo Livelihoods after COVID-19. Proposal "Age is no hindrance" by Akane Saito, Eduard Hauska, Hyuga Obana, Satoru Ito. 2020. Professors: Noemí Gómez Lobo and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto.
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted existing social disparities according to work type. The "stay at home" motto forced employees to disrupt their daily routines and to work remotely from their homes. However, for many workers it was impossible to avoid physical contact with others. The bodies of people who performed life-sustaining tasks continued to inhabit the same spaces. Who, then, were these "essential workers"? Ironically, most of them are treated as disposable during conventional "normality". They are the demographic group that survives on temporary contracts and low pay. The supermarket cashier, the uber-eats rider, the facility cleaner, the Amazon driver, the nursing assistant, or the unwaged homemaker. That is: those who feed, those who heal and those who care.
Acknowledging that this phenomenon is intertwined with socio-environmental matters, in the "Non-binary city: Food architectures nourishing Tokyo" studio (2021) we questioned our relationship with food. How we eat shapes our habitat, establishing strong divisions according to efficiency and industrialization. Feeding a city comes with the binary assumption of the rural as a place of production versus the urban as a place of consumption. However, different crises expose the vulnerabilities of our current food systems. From the kitchen to the supermarket, architecture functions as a vessel for these food-related practices.
Figure 6_ Non-binary city: food architectures nourishing Tokyo. "Urban Guerrilla Farming" proposal by Jianhang Jiang. Professors: Noemí Gómez Lobo and Masatoshi Hirai.
Further delving into ecofeminist epistemology, "Non-binary city: Rethinking Institutional Architectures" (2022) questioned the segmentation of many vital aspects of city life aimed at improving efficiency through mere functionalism. The development of various architectural typologies (schools, hospitals, nursing homes, kindergartens, city halls, etc.) from the nineteenth century to the present has contributed greatly to society, guaranteeing access to education and health care for all citizens and not only for the most privileged elites. However, it has remained an established system that follows very standardized solutions. These "institutional architectures" lack the capacity to respond flexibly to diverse social conditions. At the same time, the pace of change in the way we work is accelerating, and the environmental costs are creating challenges that cannot be addressed within the traditional framework. Eschewing the logic of the "institutional" and its rigid systems, the course explored design strategies that understood reproductive tasks (educating, caring, training, supporting) as the basis of architectural designs.
By understanding the existing situation, the "non-binary city" courses grounded the design proposal as network—and site-specific. Working collectively on a research booklet, a first diagnosis of the spatial characteristics of the selected typologies was undertaken to unveil its design principles, the binary assumptions embedded in their morphologies, and their potential contributions. Next, it was vital to conduct a careful mapping process, overlaying topographical and historical maps with the ecology of livelihood was crucial to identifying interdependencies. Interweaving rigorous research with design, students used two colors to map the productive and reproductive activities that took place in their selected sites, testing new drawing skills using texture, swatches, and different opacities. The non-binary framework was proposed as a critique of the polarized urban structure, detecting how the two colors could merge.
Students challenged dichotomous models, using stitching techniques to overcome the barriers caused by the division of labor, deploying a diverse range of interventions, from hacking suburban developments to corporate buildings, inserting caring devices in industrial areas, rediscovering alleys to activate productive commons, parasitizing existing structures, in urban guerrilla farming activities or reimagining an ageless public space. Their proposals showed how they had learned from the livelihood practices conducted in each site, creating hybrids, cross-scale and multifunctional, that reconcile production and maintenance. The projects understood architecture as a complex endeavor that involves going beyond the object to impact the social ecosystem in which it is situated.
The next design studios focused on the notion of commoning, based on an understanding of maintenance as a care practice that enhances interactions with other living beings. Since the beginning of the modern period, city dwellers have gradually become disconnected from the natural environment, becoming highly dependent on industrial products. The total reliance on services provided by larger entities has caused the loss of connectivity and skills that link citizens to the territory. Furthermore, ecological degradation resulting from extractivist models harms the biocapacity of the planet. In the wake of crisis, enhancing urban commons is fundamental to weaving connections between citizens and resources in densely built environments. From an ecofeminist perspective, this understanding of urban commons refers to a broad set of finite natural and cultural resources that both humans and non-humans share in the city. In a shared ecological system, governance goes beyond anthropocentric vision to consider the circularity that benefits other species.
Design practice is utterly influenced by the extent to which planners—who are usually men—understand the relationship between humans and the larger surrounding world that includes other beings. Architecture and urbanism can no longer afford a rationale based on capitalist and consumerist premises, but must move toward a logic of repair and coexistence. Without an absolute rupture with current practice capable of dealing with the actual physical fabric of the city, it seems urgent to reimagine commons capable of accommodating multi-temporal and multi-species needs. A series of questions relevant to this studio arise: How might an interspecies understanding of architecture and urbanism be developed, where humans are not the only beneficiaries? What are the conditions that ensure coexistence with other living beings while enriching urban commoning? In this context, urban forestry emerges as an interdisciplinary practice involved in the planning, management, and maintenance of urban green infrastructures. In this manner, it presents a critical framework to subvert the implicit barriers and assumptions that shape our relations with natural resources in the city, as follows: (1) The realm of nature is situated in the rural world. (2) Nature in the city is not productive but aesthetic. (3) Parks are just the absence of a built environment. (4) Urban forestry is only professional tree maintenance. (5) The material value of trees is limited to wood. (6) Wooden houses are not urban forests. (7) Architectural design should be exclusively site-specific. From an ecofeminist stand, this workshop focused on urban forestry as a care practice that, by recirculating various material resources produced by tree maintenance, has the potential to create relationships between urban inhabitants and urban forests.
The students explored Mizumoto Park in Tokyo's Katsushika ward as a case study to reveal the latent more-than-human assemblages there by redesigning existing pavilions as possible architectural prototypes. The students visited the park and its surrounding neighborhood, looking for the existing forestry resources such as logs, branches, leaves, seeds, seedlings, bark, fruits or salvaged timber. They paid particular attention to the accessibility of these resources by noting the actors who access them: professionals, neighbors, and non-human agents, as well as identifying the barriers that restrict their interactions. After this analysis, the students designed an urban forestry network for a future interspecies scenario in the short, medium, and long term. Learning from the existing typologies of urban forestry elements in the park, such as: tools sheds, compost piles, tree nurseries, or community farming, the students situated their designed network in specific areas inside the park, performing their activities symbiotically with the environment.
Figure 7_ Design for More than Human Commons Studio. 2021. Professors: Diego Martín Sánchez and Fuminori Nousaku.
The workshop produced a wide range of inventive urban forestry elements. A group of students focused on the preservation of the Metasequoia (Dawn Redwood), which was believed to be extinct in the area. The spatial proposals consisted of visitor participation in maintaining, reproducing, and regenerating the species, as well as providing support to other indigenous species and recreational activities. Another team designed prototypes utilizing micro-biotic decomposition, aquatic plant phytodepuration, and the intensification of migratory bird habitats. A further group proposed a series of pavilions in the existing open tree nursery, utilizing the spatial grid and diverse species to allow for shared everyday care activities such as cooking, cleaning, and sewing. Finally, the collaboration between the students generated a situated assemblage that construct more-than-human-commons in the Tokyo park.
This article has reviewed ecofeminism as a significant theoretical framework for addressing eco-social challenges and its applicability to architectural education. To this end, it has examined a non-binary pedagogical methodology, designed ad-hoc for a series of courses taught by the authors at several Japanese universities, but that would be at the same time adaptable to different contexts, scales, and topics. Flexibility is achieved by searching for entrenched binary assumptions in each context. Once barriers are identified, design strategies that dissolve or reframe the various dichotomies are questioned. The students worked simultaneously in a trans-scalar manner encompassing activities including the exploration of socio-economic statistics, critiquing of architectural typologies, the ethnographic mapping of entire neighborhoods, and the in-depth study of spaces, tools, and species. In this sense, a change certainly occurred in the master's design studios, whose focus altered from an exclusive focus on the house or the human habitat, toward the inclusion of more-than-human concerns.
Given the diversity of sources, the act of drawing emerged as the necessary transversal and propositional means for developing a collective dialogue on both the process and the results. Although it may appear oxymoronic given the non-binary framework of the work, only two colors were used in the master studios. They proved useful for diagnosing and identifying the materializations of the various binaries, and the assumptions underlying architectural design in the city. We were able to track how the project was able to disrupt and overcome different barriers. The goal was not to contrast, but to balance and superimpose these two hues to show the overlapping potentials of the project. Personal expression was conveyed by the thickness of the lines used, the styles, as well as the textures and swatches used. Minimizing the color palette was a method of challenging conventional modes of representation, as well as giving agency to drawing as a critical tool.
One of the limitations of this study is that the courses took place in a single setting, the Japanese city. Nevertheless, the adaptability of the methodology means it could be extended to other contexts in search of future non-binary scenarios. These include rural areas, places where the eco-social emergency is particularly evident, or larger territorial projects. It would also be beneficial to examine similar topics, such as housing or working, in different geographical locations in order to identify patterns or deviations from previous trajectories.
It is worth noting that all the courses took place during the COVID-19 pandemic and over the next two years. This background proved to be particularly fertile for questioning in real time the barriers being addressed in the design studios. Even though the specific crisis has passed, experience has demonstrated the relevance of the ecofeminist perspective and its application through the methodology of non-binary learning as an agent of creativity in the quest for more committed pedagogies. The students' projects, whose focus ranged from the house to the park, awoke liminal activities or hedonistic pleasures that emerged on the peripheries of the normative. The studios produced a draft of a "caring city" (ciudad de los cuidados), a phrase borrowed from the title of a book by Izaskun Chinchilla (2020), which considers not only the wage-earning productive individual but also diverse bodies who are able to find their own places in the urban realm. Understanding architecture as a complex endeavor that crosses scales and involves going beyond the object, the students proposed non-binary urban-architectural projects that recognized the realities in which the productive and reproductive realms of our lives are not mutually exclusive.
* Postdoctoral fellowship UPV/EHU, funded by the European Union-NextGenerationEU.
** The publication is part of the grant JDC2022-049425-I, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR.
1 See Non-binary City conducted by professors Noemí Gómez Lobo and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto. Videos and drawings available at https://www.behaviorology.jp/ and https://vimeo.com/user129679524.