From a gender perspective, cities face problems largely because we don’t think about gender enough. One of the main things I advocate is to truly center gender as a lens of analysis. I’m not alone in this—many people are calling for the same. We need to look at different patterns of use between men, women, and non-binary people—how do different groups use cities? And then, how can we design cities to support those uses? Most cities aren’t there yet. They often treat gender, racial equality, or accessibility as “extras,” rather than core considerations. But if we actually look at the people included in those categories, we’re really talking about the majority of city users. So the main thing is how to mainstream a gender-aware approach to city planning.

Just as cities tend to be designed by default for men, the same happens with our information technologies, databases, and smart mobility solutions. It’s not a conspiracy—most men aren’t actively trying to discriminate—but because certain groups control the structures, lead companies, and run city governments, we end up designing for those groups. The lack of inclusive leadership at the top creates systemic bias.

If we acknowledge this bias, we can work to make these systems more inclusive. That’s what feminist data work is about—examining how gender inequality permeates information systems and addressing those problems at every stage of the process.

For example, women tend to make more frequent trips, often as pedestrians or public transit users. They perform what Inés Sánchez de Madariaga calls “mobilities of care” — trips for caregiving activities. How would we design cities differently if we prioritized those uses, rather than privileging the stereotypical male pattern of commuting by car from home to work and back?

This would mean designing cities that make it easy to push strollers or access public bathrooms that actually fit strollers. I recently saw a video showing how many women can’t fit strollers into public bathrooms, so they simply avoid them. Accessible and inclusive cities like these would better support women—and thus be feminist cities.

Barcelona, where we are now, was recently featured by the BBC for efforts to analyze how different genders use public spaces. For example, a collective studied public playgrounds and found that large open spaces were mostly used by boys playing sports, while girls often felt excluded because they had to compete for space.

A solution was to divide the playground into multiple smaller spaces—still including fields for sports but also creating diverse areas that support the use of all genders more effectively.

One aspiration is to see better-integrated cities in terms of race, especially in the U.S. context. Another is cities that support many different bodies—pregnant women, breastfeeding women, disabled people, older adults, and very young children.

If we consider all these bodies, which we usually don’t treat as the norm, why do we design our cities around a limited norm? I would love to see cities that truly embrace inclusivity in everything—from physical design to policy, and even to the informational and digital layers that increasingly shape urban life. ●