I’m really delighted to be here to share
with you my vision for what a feminist
city might be as a girl growing up in
London I learned very early on to be
vigilant in public spaces by the age of
12 or 13 my friends and I were all too
aware of the way that existing as a girl
in the city put us at risk whether or
not it was the shock of being groped for
the first time when I was walking home
from school the ashame that followed
being having been stalked and being told
by a woman in the street that it was my
fault
for having been out far too late for
such a young girl or whether or not it
was the embarrassment that followed
having my newly developing breasts
called out by strangers or in fact
learning what curb crawling was when it
was happening and my friend standing
next to me said I should looks down walk
fast and pretend not to notice it is the
multiple and constant threats that young
women experience that tell us that this
is not a place the city is not a place
where they belong I and most young women
across the world have been let down by a
system that does not prioritize or even
really understand what our needs are and
to some extent I think we already
understand what the social aspects of
this problem are we know that bystanders
are unlikely to intervene when they see
a woman being harassed in the street we
know that problems with the policing
system means that sexual harassment
often goes unreported and even more so
under prosecuted but I argue and I’d
like to argue here today that this is
also a problem of physical
infrastructure design is also the unlit
streets that make women feel unsafe at
night it’s the poor provision of public
toilet
it’s the overcrowded public transport
systems that means that assaults go
unnoticed and it’s the lack of safe
public spaces where women simply feel
safe to stop and rest and this brings us
to our topic the feminist city for me a
feminist city is way more than simply a
city free of sexual violence the
feminist city for me is a city where
there is equal access to the resources
that the city has to offer regardless of
any gender identity any protected
characteristics such as race class
sexual orientation or physical ability
and for me
as a lifelong feminist and a civil
engineer and an urban researcher it’s
been my absolute privilege and pleasure
to be exploring over the past few years
the ways the practical ways in which we
can make the city better designed for
women as well as men and by an extension
diversity of body types because I really
believe that the city is a amazing place
of opportunity and liberation is where
people go to seek work employment
education it’s where cultures collide
and new ideas are seeded but at the
moment the current state of City
infrastructure means that those
privileges those liberties are unevenly
distributed I think it’s clear for a lot
of us to be able to understand how
physical limitations acts limit access
to the city we know that someone in a
wheelchair has a vastly different
capability of moving freely around the
city and accessing the opportunities
that the place provides if you look at a
disability access tube map you’ll see
that it’s way way WAY limited and that
doesn’t just affect a freedom of
movement and a freedom of access to the
cultural resources of the city but it
also affects economic status
when people have to spend more money
more percentage of their income on
things like taxis just to be able to
survive it means that there’s less money
less freedom to spend on other things
and that is has all been a design
decision and I would argue that now this
moment in history it is especially
important for us to be thinking about
this and getting it right
currently 50% over 50% of the world’s
population currently lives in cities
that’s way over 3 billion people and the
fact that what 3 million people every
week are moving to cities across the
world means that by 2050 in about 30
years time we’ll be having 70% of our
global population living in cities that
is 2.5 billion more people living in
cities and by the end of this century we
expect 90% of the global population to
be living in urban environments what
that means is that the decisions that we
make about the inclusivity of our public
spaces right now will affect the quality
of life of most people on the planet by
the end of this century and today what
I’m going to try and convince you of is
that from a physical infrastructure
perspective the exclusion of certain
groups in our society is from a design
perspective a matter of choice however
unconsciously that choice is made and in
order to explore that idea a bit further
it’s useful to understand how cities
come about how are they built well
predominantly it’s by built environment
professionals you can become a
professional in this this is a
profession made up of urban planners
civil engineers the problem is that they
are not taught to critically understand
or critically analyze the ways in which
their design decisions have social
implications the ways in which one
scheme over
another might affect behavior in a
different way
moreover we know that in most countries
across the world the built environment
industry is predominantly dominated by
men now this is an issue not only
because the economic benefit of these
professions goes predominantly to male
to men but it means that because we
naturally design for our own experience
because we naturally imagine what the
possibilities and the best kind of place
could be based on our own understanding
of what good is it means if we don’t
have a representative design industry
making these cities then we are a severe
disadvantage in making sure that these
spaces are inclusive and accessible to
all and the first time I really came
across this issue was pretty early on it
was when I was a 16 year old a level
student and I was lucky enough to get my
first work experience in an engineering
firm the engineer on site took me out to
a site visit and showed me a peer that
had been involved in designing now he
explained to me that because of the
physical parameters of the space it was
actually impossible to make sure that it
was wheelchair accessible at low tide
and so my 16 year old solution-driven
excited engineering brain kicked in and
I came up with like three or four
potential ways that they could have got
around it maybe make the ramp longer
maybe think about a lift system and he
listened patiently to my ideas and then
kind of nodded his head and explained to
me that although that my ideas might
work they were way too complicated
and way too expensive and that the
client simply wouldn’t accept him and so
that was my first kind of understanding
of engineering practice it showed me
then that when it came to the crunch
value for money trumped value
is a design that didn’t work for people
in a wheelchair 40% of the time was seen
as a good enough solution here the
people in wheelchairs were simply too
complicated to include and that was seen
as acceptable but what strikes me as I
think back on that time as an adult now
is that he had first said that it was
physically impossible for me that is
because he had so internalized the
economic knowledge systems and the value
systems that made that decision
acceptable then it might as well have
been a physical impossibility to do it
any other way and I argue that this
these kinds of thinking is endemic in
our infrastructure design systems and
therefore it is absolutely of no
surprise to me is that as I’ve been
analyzing all sorts of different
infrastructure systems and cities I see
this inequality play out over and over
again so I want to give you some
examples of how this plays out in
practice one one clear example is in the
design of urban transport networks if
you think about how cities are designed
they’re usually designed to optimize
flow into the city in the morning and
out of the city in the evening now the
assumption that goes into that is that
we should be optimizing the city for
people who are accessing the paid
economically productive labor force and
that design is to the exclusion of
people who are trying to make local
journeys I think if you have spent any
time in a city like London you will you
will know that it’s pretty tricky to get
around your local area much easier to go
in and then come out and that has a
social implication it means that people
who have caring responsibilities
potentially who have to go to the school
to the shops the GP maybe visit an
elderly neighbor or family member often
carrying may potentially shopping or
pushing young children in a pram or
people who access caring work that is
based on nighttime work and shift work
it means that those people are not
accounted for and our best at best and
afterthought in the urban design process
and I’ve also seen this played out more
recently in my work looking at gender
and cycling we know that in most cities
across the world approximately 70% of
cycling journeys are undertaken by men
in London
it’s a roughly 74% in a recent study in
San Francisco it was 71 percent of
people who were cycling were men and of
course there’s nuances with that within
the female population who were cycling
women of Asian descent and Latina women
were also disproportionately
underrepresented elderly people too
found that the there were fears around
accessing cycling because of worries
about trips and Falls and accidents and
the potential health implications that
that might have but it doesn’t have to
be that way in cities like countries
like Denmark and the Netherlands women
are actually over-represented in cycling
carrying about 50 out about 55% of all
cycling journeys so when we think about
what agenda lens in cycling
infrastructure provision might mean it
would mean taking the experiences of
women seriously it would mean making
sure that the cycle lanes are
appropriately lit at all times of day it
would mean making sure that they were
physically removed from where cars were
going because that takes seriously
women’s safety concerns and encourages
and removes the barriers to cycling and
if we want more sustainable cities that
we need to take those matter seriously
similarly from a public space
perspective study after study has shown
that women feel much more uncomfortable
than men simply sitting in public spaces
they often feel that they have to be
doing something or actively
participating in some activity so is not
too
make themselves kind of a target over
the last few years
Vienna has been doing amazing work on
gender mainstreaming in their urban
planning work and so they were taking
that matter seriously and what they
decided to do was a study into the use
of public parks in Vienna so they
observed what was going on they measured
between sex age race who were using the
public parks and what they found was
that after the age of nine young girls
stopped stopped to the park and so a
massive consultation was under under
taken to understand what those issues
were and the design solution that came
out of it was to create much more
segregated areas for different types of
activity to be carried out in the park
this meant that girls and boys no longer
had to socially work out what space they
were allowed to use the the sports
activities were in a certain place and
there were other different types of
spaces provided and they found after
this solution was implemented that there
was 50/50 use of that public space and
so these are just a few examples about
how small design interventions or
different ways of thinking about
providing physical infrastructure can
radically transform who is able to
access what infrastructure what benefits
of the city at what time and so I would
like to invite you the next time you see
someone struggling to get a pram down
the stairs or when you see an elderly
person stopping in the street with
nowhere to sit down or potentially a an
aggressive cyclist
or maybe even the next time you feel
harassed or intimidated in public spaces
to consider the ways in which that has
to some extent being a design choice
made by engineers and designers who do
not truly understand the social
and finally when we try to bring this up
in our industry when I try to bring in
aspects of social justice and feminism
to the discussion is often sidelined
it’s seen as a nice other separate thing
that we might do one day once we’ve got
to the Reno real strong business of
making things making the city and
building it but for me the success of
any city is contingent on its ability to
serve all of the people in a city not
just the middle-aged men who are
building it when people are excluded
from public spaces they are excluded
from the opportunities and liberty that
the city has to offer and I intend to
spend the next however many years of my
career continuing to make that point and
trying to make cities that work for
everyone thank you [Applause]
with you my vision for what a feminist
city might be as a girl growing up in
London I learned very early on to be
vigilant in public spaces by the age of
12 or 13 my friends and I were all too
aware of the way that existing as a girl
in the city put us at risk whether or
not it was the shock of being groped for
the first time when I was walking home
from school the ashame that followed
being having been stalked and being told
by a woman in the street that it was my
fault
for having been out far too late for
such a young girl or whether or not it
was the embarrassment that followed
having my newly developing breasts
called out by strangers or in fact
learning what curb crawling was when it
was happening and my friend standing
next to me said I should looks down walk
fast and pretend not to notice it is the
multiple and constant threats that young
women experience that tell us that this
is not a place the city is not a place
where they belong I and most young women
across the world have been let down by a
system that does not prioritize or even
really understand what our needs are and
to some extent I think we already
understand what the social aspects of
this problem are we know that bystanders
are unlikely to intervene when they see
a woman being harassed in the street we
know that problems with the policing
system means that sexual harassment
often goes unreported and even more so
under prosecuted but I argue and I’d
like to argue here today that this is
also a problem of physical
infrastructure design is also the unlit
streets that make women feel unsafe at
night it’s the poor provision of public
toilet
it’s the overcrowded public transport
systems that means that assaults go
unnoticed and it’s the lack of safe
public spaces where women simply feel
safe to stop and rest and this brings us
to our topic the feminist city for me a
feminist city is way more than simply a
city free of sexual violence the
feminist city for me is a city where
there is equal access to the resources
that the city has to offer regardless of
any gender identity any protected
characteristics such as race class
sexual orientation or physical ability
and for me
as a lifelong feminist and a civil
engineer and an urban researcher it’s
been my absolute privilege and pleasure
to be exploring over the past few years
the ways the practical ways in which we
can make the city better designed for
women as well as men and by an extension
diversity of body types because I really
believe that the city is a amazing place
of opportunity and liberation is where
people go to seek work employment
education it’s where cultures collide
and new ideas are seeded but at the
moment the current state of City
infrastructure means that those
privileges those liberties are unevenly
distributed I think it’s clear for a lot
of us to be able to understand how
physical limitations acts limit access
to the city we know that someone in a
wheelchair has a vastly different
capability of moving freely around the
city and accessing the opportunities
that the place provides if you look at a
disability access tube map you’ll see
that it’s way way WAY limited and that
doesn’t just affect a freedom of
movement and a freedom of access to the
cultural resources of the city but it
also affects economic status
when people have to spend more money
more percentage of their income on
things like taxis just to be able to
survive it means that there’s less money
less freedom to spend on other things
and that is has all been a design
decision and I would argue that now this
moment in history it is especially
important for us to be thinking about
this and getting it right
currently 50% over 50% of the world’s
population currently lives in cities
that’s way over 3 billion people and the
fact that what 3 million people every
week are moving to cities across the
world means that by 2050 in about 30
years time we’ll be having 70% of our
global population living in cities that
is 2.5 billion more people living in
cities and by the end of this century we
expect 90% of the global population to
be living in urban environments what
that means is that the decisions that we
make about the inclusivity of our public
spaces right now will affect the quality
of life of most people on the planet by
the end of this century and today what
I’m going to try and convince you of is
that from a physical infrastructure
perspective the exclusion of certain
groups in our society is from a design
perspective a matter of choice however
unconsciously that choice is made and in
order to explore that idea a bit further
it’s useful to understand how cities
come about how are they built well
predominantly it’s by built environment
professionals you can become a
professional in this this is a
profession made up of urban planners
civil engineers the problem is that they
are not taught to critically understand
or critically analyze the ways in which
their design decisions have social
implications the ways in which one
scheme over
another might affect behavior in a
different way
moreover we know that in most countries
across the world the built environment
industry is predominantly dominated by
men now this is an issue not only
because the economic benefit of these
professions goes predominantly to male
to men but it means that because we
naturally design for our own experience
because we naturally imagine what the
possibilities and the best kind of place
could be based on our own understanding
of what good is it means if we don’t
have a representative design industry
making these cities then we are a severe
disadvantage in making sure that these
spaces are inclusive and accessible to
all and the first time I really came
across this issue was pretty early on it
was when I was a 16 year old a level
student and I was lucky enough to get my
first work experience in an engineering
firm the engineer on site took me out to
a site visit and showed me a peer that
had been involved in designing now he
explained to me that because of the
physical parameters of the space it was
actually impossible to make sure that it
was wheelchair accessible at low tide
and so my 16 year old solution-driven
excited engineering brain kicked in and
I came up with like three or four
potential ways that they could have got
around it maybe make the ramp longer
maybe think about a lift system and he
listened patiently to my ideas and then
kind of nodded his head and explained to
me that although that my ideas might
work they were way too complicated
and way too expensive and that the
client simply wouldn’t accept him and so
that was my first kind of understanding
of engineering practice it showed me
then that when it came to the crunch
value for money trumped value
is a design that didn’t work for people
in a wheelchair 40% of the time was seen
as a good enough solution here the
people in wheelchairs were simply too
complicated to include and that was seen
as acceptable but what strikes me as I
think back on that time as an adult now
is that he had first said that it was
physically impossible for me that is
because he had so internalized the
economic knowledge systems and the value
systems that made that decision
acceptable then it might as well have
been a physical impossibility to do it
any other way and I argue that this
these kinds of thinking is endemic in
our infrastructure design systems and
therefore it is absolutely of no
surprise to me is that as I’ve been
analyzing all sorts of different
infrastructure systems and cities I see
this inequality play out over and over
again so I want to give you some
examples of how this plays out in
practice one one clear example is in the
design of urban transport networks if
you think about how cities are designed
they’re usually designed to optimize
flow into the city in the morning and
out of the city in the evening now the
assumption that goes into that is that
we should be optimizing the city for
people who are accessing the paid
economically productive labor force and
that design is to the exclusion of
people who are trying to make local
journeys I think if you have spent any
time in a city like London you will you
will know that it’s pretty tricky to get
around your local area much easier to go
in and then come out and that has a
social implication it means that people
who have caring responsibilities
potentially who have to go to the school
to the shops the GP maybe visit an
elderly neighbor or family member often
carrying may potentially shopping or
pushing young children in a pram or
people who access caring work that is
based on nighttime work and shift work
it means that those people are not
accounted for and our best at best and
afterthought in the urban design process
and I’ve also seen this played out more
recently in my work looking at gender
and cycling we know that in most cities
across the world approximately 70% of
cycling journeys are undertaken by men
in London
it’s a roughly 74% in a recent study in
San Francisco it was 71 percent of
people who were cycling were men and of
course there’s nuances with that within
the female population who were cycling
women of Asian descent and Latina women
were also disproportionately
underrepresented elderly people too
found that the there were fears around
accessing cycling because of worries
about trips and Falls and accidents and
the potential health implications that
that might have but it doesn’t have to
be that way in cities like countries
like Denmark and the Netherlands women
are actually over-represented in cycling
carrying about 50 out about 55% of all
cycling journeys so when we think about
what agenda lens in cycling
infrastructure provision might mean it
would mean taking the experiences of
women seriously it would mean making
sure that the cycle lanes are
appropriately lit at all times of day it
would mean making sure that they were
physically removed from where cars were
going because that takes seriously
women’s safety concerns and encourages
and removes the barriers to cycling and
if we want more sustainable cities that
we need to take those matter seriously
similarly from a public space
perspective study after study has shown
that women feel much more uncomfortable
than men simply sitting in public spaces
they often feel that they have to be
doing something or actively
participating in some activity so is not
too
make themselves kind of a target over
the last few years
Vienna has been doing amazing work on
gender mainstreaming in their urban
planning work and so they were taking
that matter seriously and what they
decided to do was a study into the use
of public parks in Vienna so they
observed what was going on they measured
between sex age race who were using the
public parks and what they found was
that after the age of nine young girls
stopped stopped to the park and so a
massive consultation was under under
taken to understand what those issues
were and the design solution that came
out of it was to create much more
segregated areas for different types of
activity to be carried out in the park
this meant that girls and boys no longer
had to socially work out what space they
were allowed to use the the sports
activities were in a certain place and
there were other different types of
spaces provided and they found after
this solution was implemented that there
was 50/50 use of that public space and
so these are just a few examples about
how small design interventions or
different ways of thinking about
providing physical infrastructure can
radically transform who is able to
access what infrastructure what benefits
of the city at what time and so I would
like to invite you the next time you see
someone struggling to get a pram down
the stairs or when you see an elderly
person stopping in the street with
nowhere to sit down or potentially a an
aggressive cyclist
or maybe even the next time you feel
harassed or intimidated in public spaces
to consider the ways in which that has
to some extent being a design choice
made by engineers and designers who do
not truly understand the social
and finally when we try to bring this up
in our industry when I try to bring in
aspects of social justice and feminism
to the discussion is often sidelined
it’s seen as a nice other separate thing
that we might do one day once we’ve got
to the Reno real strong business of
making things making the city and
building it but for me the success of
any city is contingent on its ability to
serve all of the people in a city not
just the middle-aged men who are
building it when people are excluded
from public spaces they are excluded
from the opportunities and liberty that
the city has to offer and I intend to
spend the next however many years of my
career continuing to make that point and
trying to make cities that work for
everyone thank you [Applause]
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