Category: Women’s Studies

Five Things Urban Planners Must Do to Foster Women’s Health

10/27/2011

What if your daughter couldn’t learn reading or math because it is unsafe to walk to school? What if your neighborhood had no clean running water, but it was your duty to serve healthy meals to your aging in-laws? What if the simple act of crossing the street in time to transfer from one bus to another put you and your children at risk because of poor transit system design? For many women in cities around the world, these “what ifs” are too real.
Women have first-hand knowledge of the particular ways that poorly lit streets, crowded subway cars, and bad or nonexistant infrastructure effect their well-being. And now there’s a growing body of research to back up what the proverbial grandmother could have told us.