This paper aims to investigate in what way equality can be understood from spacial planning in the shaping of activity spaces. In order to investigate this, interviews with planners who recently worked with a gender equality project within the category of "activity areas" were conducted.

The studied projects have been granted the National Board of Housing, Building and Planning’s support for its work on gender equality and is therefore, by the National Board of Housing, Building and planning, considered well motivated and well thought through on their work on gender equality. The interviews took as its starting point the illustration plan of the activity area/space and from this, the respondent got to describe the space, after that the interview flowed relatively freely.

The paper has a hermeneutic interpretive approach, which means to understand or interpret experiences or phenomena, in this case, how people active within spacial planning, reason about equal places. The material, the transcribed interviews, were analyzed using a qualitative content analysis in two steps. From this analysis, it emerged that gender equality can be understood in different ways. These different perceptions of the meaning of the concept makes for a gap between the projects. The different starting points for what can be considered as unequal give rise to processes that indeed touch on similar points, but still differ on essential points. These different starting points and processes in turn creates spaces that despite major differences, can both be understood and explained as equal.