Culture, Gender, and Emotions in Urban Green Spaces : Migrant women’s encounters of urban green spaces in Istanbul and Stockholm

Sammanfattning: This thesis sets out to explore how immigrant women encounter urban green spaces in Istanbul and Stockholm in their everyday lives. Underlying this focus is the importance of urban green spaces’ in providing a sustainable future and a healthy life for all and inequalities in accessing these spaces. Considering a lack of focus on gender and power dynamics in the environmental perception studies and urban green spaces, this thesis inductively explores how women encounter and experience urban green spaces and how power shapes these experiences by adopting a feminist epistemology and methodology through the use of in-depth interviews and qualitative GIS. Using Google Earth as a qualitative GIS method allows for non-verbal expressions to come forward during the interviews and creates a more collaborative and inclusive research process in line with a feminist methodology adopted in this thesis. My findings further contribute to how to practically design inclusive urban green spaces. The findings show that the cultural and gendered constructions of urban green spaces shape how these spaces were experienced by the women participants. The findings also show that body is an important source of knowledge in understanding how women encounter and experience these spaces. Through understanding the role of gender and culture in shaping these spaces and hence the experiences, my findings contribute to scholarship on the accessibility of urban green spaces. How my research participants experience green spaces in the case study locations highlighted the need to understand accessibility beyond physical proximity