E32: Women Changing Cities: The Leaders Reshaping Our Streets with Melissa Bruntlett

What does it feel like to move through a city without fear? To just... switch off?

For Melissa Bruntlett, author, mobility advocate, and co-author of the new book Women Changing Cities, that feeling isn't a luxury. It's a design choice. Far too few cities are making it.

In this episode of Talking Place, host Tanisha Raffiuddin is joined by Melissa Bruntlett, mobility advocate and co-author of Women Changing Cities, to explore why the cities moving fastest on people-first mobility are so often led by women and what it's really costing them to get there.

From the gendered reality of political backlash to the chronic underfunding of community engagement, Melissa brings evidence, honesty, and global perspective to one of the most important questions in urban design today: who is the city actually built for?

This conversation goes beyond bike lanes and transport policy to ask something bigger: what does it feel like to move through a city without fear, and how do we build more of them?

Topics covered:

• Why women-led cities are accelerating mobility reform
• The real cost of women in urban leadership: backlash, police escorts, and personal attacks
• Women-only carriages: progress or a step backwards?
• What a gender-responsive city looks, feels, and functions like
• Multimodal travel explained and why car-centric thinking excludes most people
• The "software" gap: why community engagement is chronically underfunded
• The economic case for people-first mobility
• Global lessons from Paris, Bogotá, Tirana, Delhi, Sydney, and Montreal
• E-bikes as an accessibility tool, not a trend
• The future of urban mobility

About Our Guest

Melissa Bruntlett is a mobility advocate, author, and co-founder of Modacity, based in Delft, Netherlands. Together with her husband Chris, she has written three books on cycling, cities, and the way we move, including Building the Cycling City, Curbing Traffic, and their latest, Women Changing Cities.

Melissa's work sits at the intersection of gender, mobility, and urban design. She has collaborated with organisations including Women Mobilize Women and the Dutch Cycling Embassy, and has spent the past year travelling the world documenting the women leaders quietly transforming how cities move and the personal price many of them are paying to do it.

Join the Conversation

Who is your city built for? What would it take to make it work for everyone?

Share your thoughts with us on Instagram or LinkedIn @TalkingPlacePodcast using #TalkingPlacePodcast

Links & Mentions

●     Women Changing Cities: https://www.modacitylife.com/women-changing-cities

●     Melissa Bruntlett: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissa-bruntlett/

●     Women Mobilize Women: https://womenmobilize.org/

●     Dutch Cycling Embassy: https://dutchcycling.nl/

●     Anne Hidalgo - former Mayor of Paris

●     Claudia Lopez - former Mayor of Bogotá

●     Clover Moore - Mayor of Sydney

●     Valerie Plante -  former Mayor of Montreal