My city, your city, everybody’s city

An online chaired debate with audience participation (using interactive mobile apps) and chaired questions and answers involving female partners from women-led practice Pollard Thomas Edwards alongside clients and industry figures including:

Chair - Tricia Patel, partner, Pollard Thomas Edwards
Fayann Simpson, Chair of L&Q’s Resident Services Board
Josiah Elleston-Burrell, Architecture student, Bartlett
Amanda Girling-Budd, London Older Lesbian Cohousing
Bek Seeley, Managing Director, Development Europe at Lendlease
Kaye Stout, partner, Pollard Thomas Edwards

As a 2020 World Bank study states: “Cities work better for men … than for women,” with the lack of women – just 10 per cent - in senior jobs at leading architecture firms, a problem. Commenting, LSE’s Fran Tonkiss said: “because women know what it is like to be excluded by cities’ designs, they approach urban planning with this wholesale, more inclusive approach. It is about creating a physical environment that is not designed around the fully grown, able-bodied male subject.”

Clearly greater diversity among designers and clients and deeper citizen engagement would ensure new placemaking is more inclusive, regardless of gender and background.

Given its traction among developers, architects and politicians our expert panel will focus on how the 15-minute city idea – a urban design approach conceived by a wealthy, educated, white man - Carlos Moreno of the Sorbonne in Paris – can be implanted in a fundamentally inclusive manner.