For a Heart-Centered Feminist City

Look around, it’s all created by men. Urban ethnographer, ‘professional people-watcher’, academic, Johnston-Zimmerman is committed to the power of women in city-making in the US and Europe – so much so that she made the BBC’s 100 Women List.

She understands cities and public spaces through direct observation: people’s movements, their interaction with architectural elements, the ways they socialise and their digital drifts. Johnston-Zimmerman places field investigation at the centre of her work as an urban anthropologist, with the aim of understanding and deciphering social behaviour within cities.

She wants to bring feminism into a still predominantly male universe and spread a humanist, non-patriarchal vision of urban planning & design. She does this with Women Led Cities Initiative, the organisation she co-founded, and THINK.urban, a research consultancy. And she disseminates it through the podcast Third Wave Urbanism, which explores the new normal of urbanism in globalised cities.

What and how much space do women have in city making today? How do gender, design and place interact? These are just some of the questions Johnston-Zimmerman wants to find answers to. For a feminist city.