Women Not Included: Urban Planning

0:00Dr Ella Hubber:This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

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1:05Dr Ella Hubber:I often go for walks around my city with one of my oldest friends from school, and she has two young children. There is one who is old enough to happily toddle alongside us, and another who she pushes in a pram. And I have watched as she has wrestled with narrow walkways that barely fit the wheels of the pram, with high curbs that she struggles to push the pram over or even stairs that she has to carry it up step by step. I try and help where I can, but I don't think she even notices. It's possible she did at one point, but this is just part of her everyday experience now. She tolerates these streets which were not made for her to live comfortably.

1:50Dr Ella Hubber:I'm Ella Hubbard and this is Women Not Included for Discovery on the BBC World Service.

1:59Dr Ella Hubber:In this six-part series, we will be exploring the many ways the world has not been designed with women in mind. Today, we're talking about where we live, work and relax, cities and shared spaces. And traversing these spaces with me is science journalist Chavi Sachdev in Mumbai, India. Hi, Chavi. Hello, Ella. When I say cities, shared spaces, does anything jump out at you as not fitting women's needs? Everything. Let me start with office spaces. When I worked in Boston, I used to keep a cardigan over my work chair because I was always shivering when I was in the office. I know that pain. So rain or shine, I often wear my coat in the BBC office in Cardiff.

2:48And do you notice if your male colleagues do the same? I suppose they don't. Yeah, well, I couldn't help but notice that. So I had to look it up and it turns out there is a reason you and I are left shivering. Women have fewer muscle cells and more fat cells, and fat cells are less active and produce less heat. So generally, we like things a little warmer.

3:11Dr Ella Hubber:Okay, okay. That makes sense. So ideally, we need to raise office temperatures. But But at the same time, it's probably a little easier and more professional for me to put on a coat than it is for a man to remove more layers of clothing in the office. I don't disagree, but that's not really the problem, is it? The problem is that office temperatures are generally based on average male metabolic rates, which is the amount of energy your body uses in a given time. And according to a study published in Nature Climate Change in 2015, most building thermostats use a model to decide a comfortable temperature.

3:49And that's based on a 40-year-old man weighing 70 kilos, which was developed in the 1960s.

3:55Dr Ella Hubber:Oh, OK, I see. So women were never even factored into this decision in the first place. I mean, if this was decided in the 60s, it does make sense. Women weren't in the workplace nearly as much as they are today. If I'm to play devil's advocate, you know. I'm not disagreeing again, but why hasn't this changed? Why indeed. So pavements that don't fit prams, cold offices, these may seem like minor inconveniences, but they could point to a larger issue. How our buildings, facilities and entire cities may fail half of the population. So, Chavi, you and I are going to split up now and do a little bit of our own research on this.

4:40Dr Ella Hubber:And to make sure we're really covering our bases, I'm also going to talk to some experts. I will see you soon. What it did for women was either leave them very isolated. When you look at bathrooms, they're actually a mirror to our society. There are women-only carpools. There are women-only train cars. I always like to say you can't solve problems that you don't even know exist. Hi, Chavi. Welcome back. Hello there. And what do you have for me, Ella? Okay, strangely, I was struck by inspiration for this while I was out at the theatre and I went to the toilet during the interval. Well, to be precise, I was queuing for the toilet.

5:25As we so often are.

5:26Dr Ella Hubber:Exactly. There is inevitably going to be a queue for the women's toilets in many public spaces. And I get it. We have more to do in the toilet, so we're going to take longer. But I wondered if this hinted at a larger issue. If this is going where I think it's going, then it certainly does. Are we going to talk about potty parity? We are. Or rather, Lina Aberraffy is going to. Lina is the founder of Better for Women, a women's rights advisory firm, and she has written about potty parity before and worked in countries where it is a very serious issue. So first off, let's hear from her what potty parity actually is.

6:11It's the idea that we are fighting for equitable access to public restrooms for women and for men. And when I say equitable, I don't mean equal. I don't mean it's same, same. I mean a recognition that our bodies, our biology, our social roles are different, and therefore we need more time and more space.

6:33Dr Ella Hubber:And that thus far has not been allocated to us. In, say, your standard city, what does women's access to public restrooms look like? I mean, what's important to know is that when you look at bathrooms, they're actually a mirror to our society. It's about who's valued, who's accommodated, who has to wait, who's excluded as well. Back in the day, I think in the Victorian era, there was a concept called the urinary leash, that women could only go as far as they could get back home because there were no public toilets for women. But in general, the statistics say that women have a 34 times longer wait in busy settings.

7:1534 times. We need spaces that recognize that we do need more space and we do need more time.

7:23Dr Ella Hubber:Most public bathrooms today do allocate 50-50 floor space to men and women, at least that's what I've seen. This isn't right then, given the disparity in time between men and women or their needs? Yes, exactly. I mean, women do need more space and more time. Women are very often the ones who have to bring children in. Just the way our bodies work, we need more time. It's not about making it 50-50, equal, equal space, equal number of toilets. You know, men also get a urinal. That's like a giant trough. But the thing is, there are real consequences for women if you can't go to the bathroom, if the line is too long, if you have to wait, if you can't find one, you know, thinking about things like our likelihood of urinary tract infection, bladder damage and chronic pelvic pain.

8:14And then let's not even get to menstruation, which is a whole other story about how we need

8:19Dr Ella Hubber:even more time if we're menstruating. You have written about how this issue goes beyond just time wasted. There is another very serious side to women's access to public facilities, right? Exactly. So we know that one in three women worldwide are at risk because they have nowhere safe to go to the bathroom. 1.25 billion women and girls have no access to safe private toilets. 526 million have no toilet at all. So when we talk about safe and private toilets, That means access that is lit, a path that is cleared, not in a risky area, a stall that is lockable from the inside, because bathrooms in countries where I have worked are sites of violence.

9:08I've covered about 20 different countries, but this is true just about everywhere where we lack adequate facilities. Just about everywhere that is in conflict, crisis, the aftermath of war or a climate disaster, the bathrooms become the most dangerous place.

9:24Dr Ella Hubber:Is it simply a lack of funding for these facilities? Funding is always a problem, yes, especially now, but it is a lack of awareness as well. So what is needed in those kinds of contexts in a humanitarian response, especially in the early days, is somebody like me, the role that I used to play, which is reminding people that women need safe spaces, toilets that are lit, lockable, accessible, etc. etc. What needs to happen in those situations especially is that women and girls as well need to be part of the leadership teams, the design. I mean, we cannot design things for women without women. Thank you to Lina Aborafi there.

10:13Dr Ella Hubber:So, Chavi, I think that potty parity can seem like quite a small issue when you're just thinking about floor space and queuing. But Lina tells us that it can have huge consequences as over a billion women are left without access to safe public toilets. The most shocking thing to me was the concept of a urinary leash. I'd never heard of it and it sounds barbaric. And you know, that era is over, but the underpinning action to bring us out of that time to match our reality is far behind where it should be. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I said that the queuing and the floor space is a small issue, but it is a tangible reflection of a society that doesn't always consider women's needs.

10:57I've covered party parity in India. And let me point out that it's beyond unfair. Even when there are public toilets in India, men pee for free, women have to pay money.

11:07Dr Ella Hubber:What? Wait, sorry. Women pay for toilets in India, but men don't? It's because of the design of the toilets and the fact that women need not just a urinal, they have to use an actual toilet and it takes money and effort to clean it. And women, as Lina said, are commonly assaulted when they use outdoor facilities. And I've reported on this and seen it because although the danger is usually from human men, they can also have encounters with wildlife and all too commonly in India, snakes. Oh dear, I complained about having to queue for the toilet earlier. And although I believe now that this is a side effect of a lack of consideration in planning spaces around women, I also acknowledge that I'm very lucky that queuing is usually the worst I have to worry about.

11:54Before you think this lack of toilets is a Global South problem, it's not so easy for women even in the Global North. So men everywhere can simply turn their backs and, you know, the world is their toilet. But in my research, I found that in 2015, a woman called Hirte Piening in Amsterdam was fined for urinating in public. And here's what she told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as it happens in 2024. So actually, I know it is illegal. But yeah, I actually had at that night, no other choice to pee in the alley. So at that time, there were 35 urinals for people who can standing up. And there were two or three public toilets for everyone.

12:39Dr Ella Hubber:I'm sorry, she said there were 10 times less facilities, less public toilets for women, for anyone who needs to sit down. Yeah, only three public toilets for women in Amsterdam. So there was a lot of backlash from the public, especially after here to refuse to pay the fine. But it took nine years for the city to agree to build more public toilets for where you could actually sit down.

13:13Dr Ella Hubber:You're listening to Women Not Included for Discovery on the BBC World Service, where we explore the many ways the world is not designed for women. This time, we're talking about how shared spaces, facilities and whole cities can exclude half of the population. We've already discussed how office temperatures based on the male average leave us shivering and how lack of access to equitable toilet space is more than just a queue, it can be dangerous. But the issue is much, much bigger than this. It extends to the design of entire cities. To get the bigger picture, I spoke to Leslie Kern, author of three books about the design of cities, including Feminist City Claiming Space in a Man-Made World.

13:56Historically, cities were designed by and for men based around their needs, their bodies, their experiences, such as, you know, how and where they went to work. Prep for a busy week with Whole Foods Market. Start your day with fully cooked breakfast sausages from Amy Liu, 365 brand frozen waffles with no bleached flours, and of course, Whole Foods Market eggs, which are all cage-free or better. In the evening, bring home a build-your-own family meal that feeds four for just$35. Choose one entree and two sides. Shop smarter, not harder, at Whole Foods Market. When you're building a small business, every day brings new challenges and opportunities.

14:41More than 1 million small business owners across America trust the Hartford to help protect what they have built. Because no two businesses are alike, the Hartford makes it easy to get a customized quote for your business. The right coverage helps protect your livelihood. Protect what you've built. Get a quote today at thehartford.com slash smallbusiness. That's thehartford.com slash smallbusiness. What our social lives look like and, of course, built around the sort of arenas that were for a long time solely the domain of men, like politics, education, finance, industry. We can still see traces of that very evidently, very much alive in our built environments today.

15:28Dr Ella Hubber:And one of the things, the effects of this that you have talked about is public transport and how women move around cities. How does this affect women? So public transportation systems, even our roadway systems, were kind of long designed to get the breadwinner husband from his home in the suburbs to work and back. But decades of research have shown that women's journeys tend to be much more complicated than that. They don't always travel at nine to five. They make multiple stops. For example, you're dropping the kids at school or daycare on the way to your job as well. Maybe you're also detouring to pick up something for dinner or an extra package of diapers.

16:10And all of this has meant that the existing systems that we have have really not served women well. Women really kind of are like swimming upstream against these systems and infrastructures that really weren't designed with their typical days and travel patterns in mind.

16:29Dr Ella Hubber:And does the actual layout of the city and the design of that play a role in this as well? Absolutely. For a long time, it was thought that the ideal urban plan was one that had a pretty strict separation between residential areas, industrial, commercial, retail, green and institutional spaces. What it did for women was either leave them very isolated in the home in these residential areas that were not well connected to retail services or to work environments, or left them kind of struggling how to figure out moving in between these spaces, again, with transportation systems that kind of had one journey in mind and not those complicated journeys through and to and in between all of these spaces that women are more likely to do.

17:18Dr Ella Hubber:And outside of travel, you know, post-COVID, people have been talking a lot more about third spaces. And I wonder as well about women's place in public spaces in general. You know, do cities have appropriate inclusive spaces for women to just spend time and inclusive infrastructure? In a lot of cases, cities are not doing as well as they could. And as you say, third spaces, those kind of in-between spaces where you are just sort of free to spend time without necessarily having a specific purpose like work or spending money, consuming something, those have been kind of shrinking in general anyways.

17:55But I think women have often found that like outdoor public spaces are not as accommodating as they could be in terms of, you know, is there infrastructure to change a baby or nurse a baby? Are there accessible walkways and ramps into and out of those spaces? All of these things can tend to be lacking in public space or the public space that we have might be designed around, oh, well, it's a basketball court, right? It's a particular kind of activity and often activities that are more likely to be dominated by boys and men.

18:32Dr Ella Hubber:Is there anything you would like to see, areas that you really think need improving? I think we still have some ways to go in thinking about how to improve women's safety or sense of safety in cities, whether it's their ability to feel safe and confident going for a jog in the park at night, whether it's being able to feel like they can take that night class or they can take that job that starts early in the morning because, you know, maybe they don't feel as safe using transportation, walking or getting to those places on time. time. Leslie Kern there, I think it's really easy to just kind of ignore the space around us.

19:15Dr Ella Hubber:But when you stop and think about it, like Leslie has, it's clear that they still reflect a model built around men as breadwinners. And so women are left navigating streets that don't match their daily journeys, that isolate them in their communities and can leave them feeling unsafe. The need for third spaces also stood out to me. When I lived in Boston, every time there was a nice day, I'd end up on the Esplanade or even in a local park, just reading my book, doing my thing. When I moved back to India, I was appalled that there were no places where I'd see women hang out, not at lunch break, not in the evenings.

19:50And it really impinges on women's independence, their agency. Things have moved on. We've gotten educated, we've gotten jobs, we've left behind just the domicile of child rearing and taking care of a home. But we lose then the right to movement and the right to livelihood as well.

20:11Dr Ella Hubber:And something that really stands out for me here is safety. You know, in the UK, the College of Policing carried out a survey of women and found that 62 % of them feared using public spaces. And this is caused not just by factors like poor street lighting, but things as Leslie mentioned, like zoning, which leaves these large dead areas at night that women have to navigate alone and don't feel safe to do so. I agree. And in India, I can say with confidence that overall women do not feel confident venturing out, especially at night. And this impacts so much of how we live our lives. Even where I live, Mumbai, which is called the city that never sleeps, you know, women cannot work in the hospitality industry where liquor is served or sold.

20:58And all women must end their shifts by 9.30 at night, other than if you're a cop or a nurse.

21:05Dr Ella Hubber:It comes back to your point about women's right to movement and livelihood. It's completely restricted. Sure, it keeps women safer, but it's not really a solution. No, at best, it's a band-aid. In 2022, the National Crime Records Bureau of India reported a number that averaged out to 51 cases of crimes against women every hour. So what plays out in India is that there are women-only carpools, there are women-only train cars. It doesn't address the broken system and that designers of the system are still a century behind when women were not counted as part of the workforce. We have to ask then, what do real solutions that do not restrict women look like.

21:52Dr Ella Hubber:In each episode of this series, we don't just want to hear the problems, we want to shine a light on some solutions. And for that, I went back to Leslie Kern, who told me that the key to designing safe, inclusive spaces for women has to involve them directly. I always like to say, you know, you can't solve problems that you don't even know exist. But while those planners might not have been trying to intentionally make city life hard for women, they might not have ever thought about what's it like to try to move down this sidewalk or get on a bus with a pram at 6pm. So having that diversity is really key.