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Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!

Are cities built for white, middle-aged, able-bodied men?

Food for thought
here

Tags for Forum Posts: Gender, disability

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I nearly stopped and vomited at the link to the Telegraph article about street lighting #nonsense.

Other than that, very good. A city made for 8 year olds and 80 year olds would be nice.

What was nonsense about the Telegraph article?

The stats about councils switching lights off or dimming them to save money. A handful of councils in the countryside switch off their street lights at night (think Brexit Land) to save money on electricity. Councils like ours are replacing lights with LEDs which emit less "light pollution" but provide excellent light at street level. Only a pedant scraping for evidence at the bottom of the barrel to show that councils are doing things that disadvantage women could even think of using that. Oh now I see who the author is. Sigh.

Irrelevant who the author is oh able-bodied, middle-aged white man. There are some good points here about equality and thinking about design differently. You may not agree with all her examples but she's not just writing for people who live in London. Or do women in Brexit Land as you so charmingly call it, deserve to be disadvantaged by their postcode? My favourite is still the Swedish example of someone considering pedestrians over car owners. It wasn't difficult to reverse the order of snow clearance but had a significant impact. The point is that cities that think about the young, disabled, elderly or women when planning are inevitably nicer cities for everyone, including middle-aged men.
I totally agree with you! One of the examples of street lighting was Basildon, hardly rural, and I'm sure there are plenty of people who live there who work unsociable hours and don't like walking round in the dark. Or who go out and get completely hammered, it doesn't matter really. And just because you think her statistics are dodgy or her semantics not up to scratch doesn't mean she doesn't have some interesting points. But highlighting those in order to belittle the author just looks like male, middle-class prejudice.

If you're stuck for material to back up your assertions, you can always reference a Mumbai slum.

Trouble is, there aren't many white middle-aged able-bodied men in a Mumbai slum.

And she says in car parks, concrete was substituted for glass. I would have hoped for the opposite

This article isn't just about London. It's talking about all cities.
There are plenty of able-bodied men who will take advantage of women seeking toilets in the developing world.. The stats on attacks on women and girls in India are appalling: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/aug/28/toilets-...
Lack of public toilet facilities is an equality issue. Women simply can't safely emulate men. Nor can those with bladder and bowel related disabilities.

.... in a typical Mumbai slum, there are around six toilets per 8,000 women, ......

In Haringey there are seven toilets for 130,000 females.

I'm not disputing that cities should be designed for women as well as men - I'm saying that this is a confused, badly-written article.

Seven toilets.  Public toilets? Or total toilets?

That's one of the odd things about Haringey, that no one has a toilet in their home.

Liz said public toilets.

I agree that it is stating the obvious to some extent but Liz did say it's food for thought not a peer reviewed journal.

My initial thought before reading the article was, it's not just cities, but much of the world.  My second thought was I bet a bit of mansplaining will happen on the thread.

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