La città delle donne

La città delle donne started in 2022 within the strand of work we'd been running for years on participatory design of urban space — the same strand that had already produced Verso La Favorita, Percorsi Palermo and ProMondello. This time, though, we narrowed the lens to a single question: the city seen through the eyes of women who live it.

Gender urbanism starts from a question that's simple but often ignored in traditional planning processes: who designs public space, and who is it actually designed for? Pavements too narrow for a pram, lighting that makes a route safe or unsafe depending on the hour, the way services are distributed making care work easier or harder — these are choices that look neutral but, in practice, never fully are.

We opened this collective discussion as a public space for debate, using the same horizontal method we apply to MercolEdù and to all our participatory processes: not experts explaining to the city how it should be, but residents comparing notes starting from their own lived experience.

The theme came back, in a different form, in later years too — in 2025, for instance, inside Meet and Code, with the "Mappiamo la città delle donne" workshop dedicated to mapping gender data across the city — a sign that our attention to gender urbanism didn't end with a single event, but stayed a lens we keep bringing to our work on the city.