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Amsterdam: how architecture prepares young adults for city life

7 June 2021 Comments (0) Architecture, Culture, Other, Real Estate

Urban planning : giving women a voice

HerCity is a digital platform that involves women in urban development, in order to create better cities for all. 

By reversing roles and placing women in the position of experts (“Let Her guide you” is the slogan of the operation), this digital toolkit aims to create more inclusive, more equal and more sustainable cities and communities. This is a joint project of the Swedish think-tank Global UTmaning and the UN agency UN Habitat, which is also fully in line with the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals . 

The initiative makes methods and tools available to urban actors around the world to help cities integrate women’s participation into their long-term strategies.

Although cities are meant to be built for everyone, they are, for the most part, imagined, planned and designed by men. Research shows that, from an early age, women do not use a city’s public spaces to the same extent as men, mostly because of feelings of insecurity or exclusion.

How it works

HerCity details how to co-plan cities from a female perspective. Each component contains a number of activities with detailed steps to follow (evaluation, design, implementation, etc.). In the end, thousands of small ideas, put together, make cities more pleasant to live in. A small example with this video which sums up the action of Urban Girls Movement, an initiative carried out in the suburbs of Stockholm, which proves that feminist urban development can make public space accessible to all. 

35 countries in Europe, Africa, Asia and Central America have already implemented 62 HerCity projects. 

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