From The Gendered City to Feminist Placemaking to the Urbanism of Joy: How is it all connected?

I have spent years looking at cities and asking a deceptively simple question: Who is this city actually designed for?

I remember the first time I began to understand that the problem was much bigger than a badly designed street, an unsafe underpass or a lack of lighting. I was walking through a city, doing what I had done countless times before: observing, analysing, looking at how people moved and occupied space, and I realised how much invisible calculation was happening around me.

Women were not simply walking. They were choosing where to walk. Which side of the street. How fast. Whether to look at their phones. Whether to wear headphones. Whether to stop. Whether to take a shortcut. Whether it was too late to stay. Whether someone behind them was following. Whether they should call someone. Whether they should order a taxi instead.

And I realised that none of this was appearing on the conventional maps of the city.

The street could be technically accessible. It could meet every engineering standard. It could have sidewalks, lighting, transport connections and beautifully designed buildings. And yet, for some people, the experience of that same street could be completely different.

That realisation has shaped much of my work ever since. I have become increasingly convinced that the city is not neutral.

The spaces we occupy are shaped by history, power, culture, economics and by the bodies that have traditionally been given authority to design and occupy them. Some bodies are treated as belonging. Others are questioned, watched, restricted, displaced or made to feel out of place.

This is where my journey as a feminist urbanist began. I did not start by deciding that I wanted to work under the label of feminist urbanism. I started by becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that the city we have inherited was simply the result of neutral decisions.

The more I looked, the more I saw patterns. The way transport systems assume certain kinds of mobility. The way public spaces prioritise movement over lingering. The way streets can make care work difficult. The way children are often separated from the spaces where adults gather. The way women calculate their movements after dark. The way older people can become invisible. The way disabled bodies are treated as exceptions.

The way certain communities are invited to participate only after the major decisions have already been made. And eventually I began asking a question that has stayed with me:

What if the problem isn't that some people don't fit the city? What if we have built the city around too narrow an idea of who people are?

That question eventually became “The Gendered City”, the book, my firm and everything in between.

Today, I continue exploring these questions through The Gendered City, connecting feminist urbanism, placemaking, research and practice. 

The city has a default user

In 2023, I published The Gendered City: How Cities Keep Failing Women. The book was an attempt to make visible something that is often difficult to see: that the city has a default user.

For a long time, that imagined urban user has been relatively young, able-bodied, economically productive, unrestricted in mobility and relatively free from caring responsibilities. Someone who can move from A to B without carrying a child. Someone who does not need to accompany an older person. Someone who is not carrying groceries. Someone who does not have to constantly assess whether a route feels safe. Someone whose body does not routinely encounter barriers that the city has normalised.

Once you start noticing this default, you begin to see it everywhere.

I began using the term genderfication to describe the ways gender becomes embedded in the physical, social and political production of urban space. Because gender is not simply something we carry into the city.

The city itself can reinforce gendered expectations. It determines how we move. Where we stop. Where we sit. Where we feel welcome. Where we feel watched. Who is visible. Who is represented. Who is believed. Who gets to make decisions. 

And ultimately: Who gets to belong.

This is why my work has always been about more than simply asking for safer streets for women.

From safety to freedom to Joy

When I began working on Women After Dark, my second book, I found myself returning to these questions through another part of urban life: the night. I did not want to write another book that simply told women how to stay safe after dark.

I wanted to ask something more fundamental:

What does it mean to have a right to the city at night? 

We often talk about women and the night through the language of danger, harassment, violence, lighting, surveillance and getting home safely.

Of course, these things matter.

But if this is the only way we talk about women at night, we inadvertently accept a very limited relationship between women and urban space. Because the night is not only danger.

The night is music. Friendship. Dancing. Art. Conversation. Intimacy. Discovery. Celebration. Solitude. Possibility.

Why should women experience the night primarily as something to navigate and survive? Why shouldn't women experience it as something to enjoy? This is where I began making an important distinction:

Safety is not the same as freedom.

A woman can technically be allowed to walk through a square at midnight while experiencing that same square as somewhere she needs to calculate, monitor and eventually escape.

Safety is necessary. But safety should be the floor, not the ceiling. Women deserve more than a safe route home. They deserve the possibility of wandering. Of lingering. Of meeting friends. Of dancing. Of being alone. Of taking the long way home simply because they want to.

They deserve the night. 

And this shifted something fundamental in my thinking. I stopped asking only:

How do we make cities safer for women? 

And began asking: 

How do we make cities places where women can actually thrive?

From feminist urbanism to feminist placemaking

That question eventually moved my work from diagnosis towards practice. Urbanism allows us to interrogate the systems that produce the city.

But I wanted to understand what happens when those questions become something we can actually do. This is where I came to feminist placemaking.

I began thinking about how feminist urbanism could become something we practise not only something we discuss in books, classrooms and conferences.

This led to the development of the Feminist Placemaking Academy, which I curated as a space for learning, testing and applying feminist approaches to the built environment.

The process is deliberately practical:

Observe → Listen → Map → Experience → Question → Co-create → Intervene.

We use feminist walking audits, participatory mapping, embodied observation, care mapping and collaborative design. We work with tools such as the Feminist Street Scanner and the Gendered City Index to ask questions conventional urban assessments often overlook.

Because conventional street assessments can tell us about traffic, movement, infrastructure and economic activity. Who is actually enjoying this place?

The body is also a map

One of the things that has become increasingly important in my work is recognising that cities are not experienced only through maps, infrastructure and statistics. They are experienced through bodies. 

Fear sits somewhere in the body. So does comfort. So does anticipation. So does exhaustion. So does joy.

I have become interested in creative and emotional research methods that allow women to map their experiences through their bodies.

We can ask:

Where did you feel it? Where did your shoulders tense? Where did you feel exposed? Where did you feel watched? Where did you feel that you could stay? Where did you feel free?

The body becomes another map of the city.

A woman changing her route, walking faster, avoiding eye contact, deciding not to sit somewhere or choosing another mode of transport may not appear as an obvious failure in a transport or planning report.

But her body knows. Her body is collecting data all the time.

I really believe that we need to take that knowledge seriously.

Feminist placemaking is NOT only about design

I often distinguish between inclusive design and feminist placemaking. Inclusive design might ask: How can we make sure everyone can use this space?

Feminist placemaking asks: Who decided what this space needs in the first place? Whose knowledge mattered? Who was invited to participate? Who had decision-making power? Who controlled the resources? What kinds of behaviour does the place enable? What kinds of bodies does it welcome?

A feminist place does not necessarily have a particular aesthetic. It is not defined by pink benches, feminist murals or a particular visual language. A feminist place is one where different bodies can belong, care is supported, people can participate meaningfully, marginalised knowledge is valued, people can occupy space without having to justify their presence, communities have agency, power is made visible.

But the more I worked with the language of participation, inclusion and community, the more another question started bothering me:

What happens when the language becomes easier than the actual redistribution of power?

Placefaking

This is where I developed the idea of Placefaking. 

We increasingly use words like inclusion, participation, community and empowerment in urban development. But language alone does not transform a place. 

Sometimes communities are consulted after the important decisions have already been made. Sometimes participation happens without any transfer of power. Sometimes marginalised communities are represented symbolically without receiving meaningful resources or authority. Sometimes a temporary event or installation is presented as transformation while the structures producing exclusion remain untouched. Sometimes feminist language and imagery appear without changing the organisation, budget, governance or decision-making behind a project.

I call this Placefaking.

Placefaking is the production of the appearance of an inclusive, participatory or community-centred place without meaningfully changing the power, resources, decision-making or structures that determine who a place is for. 

For me, this is an important critique of contemporary placemaking.

Because placemaking can become very good at producing the image of participation. But participation without power is not transformation. And representation in the final image is not the same as representation in the decision-making process.

Who uses the city is not enough

Who makes the city?

It is not enough to ask who uses a park, who walks down a street or who lives in a neighbourhood.

The questions need to tackle who controls the budgets, owns the land, writes the policy, produces the data, designs the project, commissions the work, decides what counts as evidence, decides what gets built, maintains it, evaluates it and ultimately benefits.

Because even if we identify gender inequality, nothing fundamentally changes if the same structures and the same people continue to control the decisions. 

Representation in the city is therefore not only about who appears in the final image. It is about who is present at the table when the image is created.

We need to imagine something different: we have a problem with imagination

Perhaps this is the part of feminist urbanism that interests me most now. Imagination.

We are very good at imagining economic growth. We are very good at imagining bigger buildings, faster transport, new developments, increased productivity and more consumption. But are we equally good at imagining a city organised around care? 

A city where children can move independently? Where caregivers are not punished by the infrastructure of everyday life? Where public space does not require consumption in order to justify your presence? Where walking is not simply a transport mode but a pleasurable part of urban life? Where women can experience the night as a place of possibility? Where equality, care, accessibility and joy are not compromises but aspirations? 

I increasingly believe that feminist urbanism cannot only be a critique of what is wrong.

It has to give us permission to imagine something else.

An urbanism of joy

This is why I have become increasingly interested in what I call an urbanism of joy. 

Joy is not a decorative layer that we add after the serious work of infrastructure, housing and mobility is finished. Joy is part of what makes urban life meaningful, but joy is political because access to it is not evenly distributed. 

Who gets to experience pleasure in public space is political. Who gets to wander is political. Who gets to linger is political. Who gets to be spontaneous is political. Who gets to feel welcome is political. Who gets to experience the night as a place of possibility rather than danger is political. And who gets to imagine a life beyond survival is political. 

For too many women, navigating the city is a constant exercise in risk management. 

I want to move the conversation beyond that.

What if our cities were designed around thriving?

What if we stopped asking only how to help women survive the city and started asking what would allow women to experience the city fully?

To play.

To rest.

To gather.

To create.

To move.

To belong.

To experience pleasure.

To experience joy.

FEMSTIVAL: practising the feminist city

This is also why I am curating FEMSTIVAL, a festival celebrating sciences, people, ideas, methodologies and differences. I wanted to create something that moved beyond the traditional format of talking about feminist urbanism. 

What happens when we actually practise it together? What happens when urbanists, placemakers, architects, artists, researchers, activists, communities and city-makers come together not only to exchange ideas, but to walk, listen, map, test, play, make and question?

FEMSTIVAL brings these different forms of knowledge together.

It is not a finished model of the feminist city. Because I don't believe there is one.

The feminist city is not a finished product

I don't think there is a perfect feminist city waiting somewhere to be discovered. A feminist city is a continuous practice of questioning.

Why are cities failing women?

Women After Dark expanded that question into one about freedom, movement and the right to experience the city after dark. Feminist urbanism became a way for me to interrogate the systems behind those experiences. Feminist placemaking became a way of turning those questions into practice. The Academy became a way of teaching and sharing that practice. FEMSTIVAL became a way of bringing people together to experience it.

And Placefaking became a way of questioning what happens when the language of inclusion becomes easier than the redistribution of power.

The question I am left with now is even simpler: What kind of city are we trying to create?

A city where people are simply accommodated? A city where women are simply safe? A city where marginalised communities are simply consulted? Or a city where different bodies can genuinely belong, participate, create, experience joy and thrive?

Because the feminist city should not be a city designed around survival. It should be a city designed around life.

(Article updated on 8 September 2026)