A new female-focused urban planning initiative is launching in the UK, prioritising well-lit parks and streets. Is it enough to give women the confidence to take their exercise outdoors?
In the soft early morning sunshine, Jen Parker can usually be found pounding Barcelona’s patterned pavements. She’ll navigate the cobbled streets down to the port before ending up at the beach. Wide walkways that don’t bottleneck with one pushchair, well-lit streets and a culture oriented around the outdoors make Barcelona what the 49-yearold customer success and support manager calls an ‘easy’ place to go running, especially when she compares it with her former homes of Manchester and Edinburgh. But while the sunny Spanish weather lends itself to outside exercise, Mediterranean meteorology can only take some of the credit.
Back in 2017, city officials enacted a measure that meant any future urban planning in Barcelona would have to consider a gender perspective; it’s since carried out gender-safety audits in various neighbourhoods, launched an anti-manspreading campaign and created ‘superblocks’, which see sections of the city closed to traffic, allowing people to walk freely and congregate in new rest areas and children’s playgrounds. It isn’t the first city to adopt such an approach. Following a survey in the 1990s, which found that men and women had different experiences of living in Vienna, more women have led the design and decision-making for the Austrian city, bringing better street lighting, seating, more parks and wider footpaths. Today, Vienna frequently features in round-ups of the world’s best cities to inhabit; the 2022 Global Liveability Index awarded it the top spot for the third time in five years. The latest region to sit up and take notice? Glasgow, making it the first British city to put the needs and safety concerns of women like you centre stage when designing built-up spaces. As both the rising mercury and cost of living drive more women from the gym, could feminist urban planning coax you outside?
Manscaping
If you’ve never come across the concept, feminist urban planning means considering what it’s like to be someone other than a man when decisions about an urban space are made. You’d be forgiven for presuming that it was already a given (quick recap that women account for 51% of the population and do go outside), but the reality is rather different. Cities have historically been designed by men, for men, says Aude Bicquelet-Lock, deputy head of policy and research at the Royal Town Planning Institute. ‘After World War II, when a lot of cities had to be rebuilt, they were designed around cars – and at the time most drivers were
