Associate Professor Nicole Kalms
Nicole Kalms is an Associate Professor in the Department of Design and founding director of the Monash University XYX Lab which leads national and international research in Gender and Place. In this role, Dr Kalms is leading two significant research projects Urban Exposure: Interactively Mapping the Systems of Sexual Violence in Cites and Women and Girls Only: Understanding the Spaces of Sexual Harassment in Public Transport. These projects are in partnership with state, national and international stakeholders.
Nicole has a PhD in Architecture from Monash University. She obtained her Bachelor Degree in Architecture from RMIT and practiced architecture for several years before undertaking a Masters degree in Landscape Architecture (RMIT). Nicole is currently a full-time member of Monash University’s Faculty Art, Design and Architecture where she is focused on cross-disciplinary research.
Dr Kalms’ recent contributions include the monograph Hypersexual City: The Provocation of Soft-Core Urbanism (Routledge 2017) examining sexualized representation and precincts in neoliberal cities. Her forthcoming monograph She City: A Design Handbook for Challenging Women’s Inequity in Cities (Bloomsbury) will draw on interdisciplinary research and case studies from gender scholars, design practitioners, and feminist activists to update the significant research on gender and the city.
The innovation of Kalms’ research is the examination of digital, experiential, political and material interventions collated to articulate both the shared and conflicted struggles of women and girls internationally. Her praxis repositions design as a strategic tool for challenging gender inequity.
Other research includes ‘Urban exposure: Feminist crowd-mapping and the new urban imaginary’ in the Routledge Companion to Urban Imaginaries (2018), ‘I’m Here’: Identity and Obscurity in Locative Safety Technology for Women in Neo-Liberal Cities’ (2017) in the edited book series Critiques, ‘Hypersexual Occupations’ (2015) in the edited book Occupation: Ruin, Repudiation and Revolution and ‘Hypersexual Transgressions’ (2014) published in the Architectural Humanities Research Association’s journal Architecture and Culture.
Dr Kalms regularly writes for a diverse non-academic audience, and is frequently invited to speak to the public about gender, sexuality and urban space at major national and international cultural institutions. Kalms has been interviewed on BBC World TV (2018) and France 24 TV (2019). Kalms was the keynote speaker at the Planning Institute of Australia Congress (2019) and the Autonomy Mobility Summit in Paris (2019).
Additional research
Associate Professor Nicole Kalms, Hypersexual City; The Provocation of Soft-Core Urbanism
Hypersexual City examines the occupation of urban space through the mediated representation of women’s hypersexualized bodies. A complex transaction proliferates in the commercial urban space of cities and Hypersexual City seeks to address the cause and consequence of the increasing dominance of gendered representation.
This book uses architectural case studies and analysis to make visible the sexual politics of architecture and urbanism and, in doing so, reveal the ways that heterosexist culture shapes the spaces, behaviour and relationships formed in neoliberal cities. Hypersexual City announces how examining urbanism that operates through, and is framed by, sexual culture can demonstrate that architecture does not merely itself adrift in the hypersexualized landscape of contemporary cities, but is actively producing and contributing to the sexual regulation of urban life.