The Question Our Cities Keep Avoiding

I want to tell you about a statistic that stopped me when Melissa Bruntlett mentioned it. 

Only 8% of mayors of the world's 300 largest cities are women. We make up half the global population. We navigate cities differently, experience them differently, and as Melissa would argue, design them differently too. And yet we hold less than one in ten of the seats that decide what those cities look like. 

That's not a footnote. That's the whole argument. 

Melissa is a mobility advocate, author, and co-founder of Modacity, based in Delft. Her new book, Women Changing Cities, co-authored with her husband Chris, set out to answer a question that had been building for years: why are the cities moving fastest on people-first mobility so often led by women? And what, exactly, is it costing them? 

She joined Talking Place fresh off a whirlwind book tour: Brussels, London, Shanghai in the space of a week and she arrived with a clarity of thought that I find rare in these conversations. 

The Backlash Is Personal and That's the Point 

This is the part of the conversation that stayed with me longest. 

Nearly all of the women Melissa interviewed for the book had needed police escorts at some point. Anonymous messages. Vitriolic attacks. Some had told her, off the record, that they might not continue in politics. Not because the work had become too hard, but because of what it was doing to their families. 

Her observation is sharp: the backlash itself isn't unique to women. Make an unpopular decision in transport or planning and people will come for you, regardless of gender. But the nature of the attacks is different. For women, it goes personal: appearance, voice, dress. Anne Hidalgo is being scrutinised for wearing a Chanel dress while nobody mentions the cost of her male counterparts' suits. These are not accidents. They are a strategy for discrediting women without engaging with what they're actually doing. 

At Concept Culture, we believe the built environment is shaped as much by who is in the room as by what is on the drawing board. This conversation reinforced why that matters, and what's at stake when those rooms stay the same. 

The Software Gap Is Costing Everyone 

One of the most practically useful ideas in this conversation is one Melissa describes with obvious frustration: the chronic underfunding of what she calls the 'software.' 

The hardware gets the budget. The cycling infrastructure, the bus rapid transit, the metro expansion. These are expensive, visible, and politically legible. The software, community engagement, communications, trust-building is treated as optional. An afterthought. A line item that gets cut when the project runs over. 

And then we wonder why communities fight back. Why projects that look good on paper collapse in the planning stage. Why well-intentioned mobility schemes generate the kind of backlash that derails councils and reverses progress. 

The answer is almost always the same: we didn't talk to people. We left a void, and someone else, with different interests, filled it. 

This is not a mobility problem. It's a communication and trust problem. And it applies to every sector in the built environment. 

What a Good City Actually Feels Like 

I asked Melissa to describe what a city that works for women genuinely feels like, not in policy terms, but experientially. Her answer was one of the most human things I've heard on this podcast. 

It feels like being able to switch off. Like moving through space without being on alert. Like knowing you'll pass someone who smiles at you, that there are eyes on the street, that you have choices for how you move and don't feel closed in. 

Most of us, women in particular, have experienced the opposite so consistently that we've stopped noticing it. The routing choices we make to stay in better-lit areas. The keys between the knuckles, just in case. The weight of being permanently, quietly on guard. 

A city that removes that weight is not a utopia. It is an achievable design decision. Melissa has lived in places that get close to it. She knows what it takes. 

The Economic Case Is There. It Just Isn't Being Made. 

One of the most important sections of this conversation is also the most underplayed publicly: the economics of active travel are genuinely compelling, and we are failing to communicate them. 

People who walk and cycle cost infrastructure less to maintain. They take fewer sick days. They spend more per visit to local businesses. They move slower, they notice things, they stop, and as a society, the downstream effects on mental health, on social isolation, on the costs borne by our health systems. All of these tips are in favour of cities that make walking, cycling, and public transport the easy choice. 

Melissa is careful to say she's not the numbers person, but she knows the numbers exist. Her argument is that until we get better at telling those stories, in terms decision-makers and communities can actually hear. The case will keep being lost to inertia and misinformation. 

That's something Talking Place exists to help with. it's a challenge I'd put to everyone reading this. 

Why This Conversation Matters 

Talking Place exists because the built environment is one of the most powerful forces shaping how we live, and because the quality of thinking about it directly determines the quality of the places we produce. 

Melissa Bruntlett is doing some of the most important work in this space right now. Not because the answers are simple, but because she's asking the right questions and documenting, carefully and with evidence, what happens when we finally start to answer them. 

This is Episode 29. It is one of the conversations I'll be thinking about for a long time. 

Listen to Talking Place Episode 29 with Melissa Bruntlett. Available now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, YouTube, and all major streaming platforms. Follow Talking Place on social media to be notified when new episodes drop. 

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Tanisha Raffiuddin is Creative Director at Concept Culture and host of Talking Place. Conversations on placemaking, branding, sustainability and culture across the built environment