Wise Fool Digest: Week of March 31, 2021

Whose city? Whose solutions?

Hi there. The sun is shining and the blooms are blooming, and we’re gonna talk about some meaty stuff — and I don’t just mean a five course meal. Strap yourself in, we’ve got ground to cover.

City Design that welcomes women in unexpected ways.

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to contrubute to a LinkedIn discussion about designing cities for women. I ran through the usual safety stuff - lighting, hidden corners, etc. — but I was pretty dissatisfied with my own response. We’re more than the safety of our bodies, aren’t we? What else makes a space distinctly welcoming to more than half the population?

This article also starts with safety issues (and shows some interesting, crowdsourced/mobile-tech driven ways to address them), but then it gets to some of the elements I was struggling with: how do women, especially non-priviledged women, use space differently than males?

The park examples in the second half of the article are intriguing, especially because they start to get at dif…