(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 567: Women Changing Cities

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Chris and Melissa Bruntlett to discuss their newest book Women Changing Cities: Global Stories of Urban Transformation. We discuss the mobility of care work and the unpaid labor the undergirds the economy, elevating the voices of people with experience, and the women getting elected to get things done.

Listen in to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it as part of our hosting archive.

Reach out to Chris and Melissa at Modacitylife.com

Find a full AI Generated unedited transcript below:

Jeff Wood: Melissa and Chris Bruntlett, welcome back to the Talking Headways podcast.

The journey since then has been long and winding, to say the least. But, um, yeah, following work in advocacy, then turning it into a business, uh, we’ve written now three books together, made the move to the Netherlands in 2019, and for myself. Having worked in other consultancies for almost 10 years, last year, I started my own consultancy, Udacity Creative, focused on helping people build that narrative and storytelling and advising on equitable transport, wherever possible.

So making sure that, you know, when people are designing for walking, cycling in public space, they’re thinking of the most of us and not just those that have the most.

That became our first book, building the Cycling City. That was our first appearance on your podcast that led to a global speaking tour and job offers in the Netherlands and moved to the Netherlands in 2019. That led to our second book, curbing Traffic, the Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives. My job with the Dutch cycling embassy, which I’ve been in now for seven years, amazingly, and yeah, most recently, our decision to pivot a little bit away from the Netherlands and write a book about global stories of urban transformation and what were their.

Common threads, and of course the spoilers in the title, women Changing Cities. But we, uh, now as Dutch citizens happily live and work in this beautiful little city of Delft, but have the privilege of traveling around the world and sharing knowledge, expertise, and inspiration with the possibilities for changing our cities for the.

And then doing it again to come here, we’re like, this is, yeah. Unless something. Monumental happens. We’re staying and we’ve always felt that in order to stay, it was important to become Dutch and to be able to

So yeah, once we basically, once you hit five years, you can apply for citizenship and there’s a series of language tests you have to do. So learning the language is a big one, which a lot of people. Struggle with, and for that reason don’t bother to become Dutch, especially if they’re already EU citizens.

And so it’s, it’s not an easy process and I think we’ve. Sort of made it look like it might’ve been a lot easier than it was, but yeah, I mean, it’s a little bit different, I think, than the citizenship process to become Canadian. There’s a lot of historical stuff we don’t actually know about the Netherlands, but culturally and language wise, I think it was.

Important to learn it. And it, I think it’s helped us get an appreciation for Yeah.

But we didn’t want to be those immigrants. And uh, we really put an effort into learning the language and we will say. In our forties, learning a new language from scratch is one of the most challenging and humbling things you will ever do. But you know, we threw ourselves into it. And it’s not just the vocabulary, it’s the sentence structure of the grammar and it continues to baffle and, and confuse and.

Frustrate us, uh, seven years in. But, uh, it’s good for the brain, right? To, you know, connect new synapses and, and rewire it, uh, in new ways. And we’ve really, I think, relished the challenge. And the kids, of course, were fluent within a year and, and we continue to be frustrated with them for that.

My, my wife is Chinese and so we went back last two years with my daughter and uh, my daughter just kind of flipped the switch and like started speaking and I was just like, what? That’s not fair. That is not fair at all. Yeah. I must’ve been hanging out with my wife speaking to her in Chinese the whole time, but it was crazy.

The first week we were there, my parents went too, who only speak English, and so she was talking to everybody and then the second week she’s like, oh, the majority of people here speak Chinese. I better start speaking Chinese. Yeah. So she had it in her, she just never used it that word before. And then just.

On and I was like, oh my gosh. That’s crazy. Yeah. Bonkers. And you guys have been all over the world too recently. I mean, I think when I was in China this last time, I think I just missed you, but you guys have been going all over a place, especially for this book, talking to different places. What’s that been like to go to different countries that maybe you wouldn’t have visited before, but actually got this amazing experience of going to?

But we knew in moving to the Netherlands and working for internationally facing organizations. That we would have this new platform, this global stage on which to work. And that’s really been just absolutely amazing. I mean, we’ve been lucky enough to travel to India, to China repeatedly, to, uh, Latin America.

And that’s really, I think, formed the new perspective that we brought to the new book. Being able to see that good urbanism is not a European thing. It’s not a North American thing necessarily. This is happening all over the world, and in some places, the lesser known stories are the ones that bring us the most joy in the most excitement, particularly in China.

When you think the complete turnaround that they’ve done from a cycling society to. A car based society and now they’re pivoting back to the bicycle. I mean, this is so important of a story to tell the world and share with the world, and now we’re lucky enough to be working with Chinese cities to help them reclaim this space from their streets and, and to build cycling infrastructure based on best practice from the Netherlands.

It’s, yeah, we don’t take that responsibility or that privilege for granted for one second and continue to relish in that challenge, that that’s what gives us energy. And that’s what. Gets us up in the morning because otherwise this is a very, as you know, it can be a very soul destroying, uh, place to work in with constant setbacks and inertia.

But, uh, finding new places to work and new sources of energy is what we’re lucky enough to do on a daily basis.

That there’s a lot. I don’t, I don’t know. And of course I, that’s part of getting into this is, you know, as a non-trained, well not trained in urban planning and transportation planning, you know, everything about this journey has been about learning about what’s happening, you know, first in Vancouver, then in North America and beyond.

And it’s sort of reignited that desire to learn what’s happening and to be able to have conversations with people about the potential. But be able to say, you know, well, okay, I understand that maybe Amsterdam is not gonna be the blueprint for what you want. And there’s certainly themes and ideas you can take from that.

But hey, look what they’re doing in Bogota. Or look what they’re doing in the Philippines and see how that might be applicable to a city like Delhi, for example, where the population density is different, the size and scale of the city is different, and to be able to. Now travel and be able to see that in real life and take those lessons to other places, I think is, for me, that’s part of what keeps driving me to make this travel.

Although, you know it’s exhausting in your mid forties to be traveling all over the world.

When we had y’all in last time, and I look back at the transcript, you said, I just can’t imagine doing it again.

You know, it was a lot of rehashing. Our first year here, a lot of interviewing, a lot of research. And at the end of the process we’re like, okay, I think we’ve said everything we need to say. If there’s anything else, someone else can say it. Now it’s, it’s time to give that platform to someone else. And then with this, Chris was mentioning this like increase of global travel and seeing what’s happening.

You know, there’s all these stories that were sort of percolating around in our brains and we’d still said, no, no, no, we’re not gonna do it. We actually had a bit of a. Heated discussion about whether or not we were gonna have write another book. And we said, no, that’s it. We’re done. And then as it happens, Chris was traveling.

We got an email out of the blue from Reba from our editor,

We’re writing another book. And we didn’t know necessarily what it was. But yeah, that was the moment, and I think it was that it was the attraction of something that could really showcase the imagery that we’ve spent so long putting together that we put a lot of care into when we travel. To really showcase that alongside the stories that are inspiring them, I think was the impetus.

And then my own work on urban transformation, and we kind of looked at each other and we said, I think there’s something there that we can explore that we’re both passionate about and we’re both interested in. And of course, well, we can talk about that. Next is, uh, what was the common denominator in, in the cities post COVID that were really making immense progress?

And that was the. Women like Anne Hidalgo were in charge.

We started, at least in the US during the last administration, we started having more discussions about. Getting this idea of care infrastructure into legislation and things like that, but it seemed to fizzle out a bit, even though the problems still linger. I’m wondering like to you all, why this specific topic is so important and why it showed up so much in the book.

We don’t, we don’t get up in the morning and have breakfast and you know, have a shower and leave for work without somebody performing some active care for us. And the same goes in terms of how people move through our cities. And I think that. The reason that it’s coming out more is, you know, as we, you know, slowly shift towards this idea that not all transport is about economic gain, it’s not about going to work and coming home.

Again, we start to understand that those trips are not the same. It’s about going and dropping kids off at school or doing groceries or. You know, running errands for your household or even for yourself, and they’re shorter. They’re usually, you know, under, well one to five kilometers or whatever that is in miles.

I’m sorry,

That’s why we started to see that shift. Um, and maybe we didn’t understand that it was related to care work at the beginning, but you know, as that starts to become more of the conversation, you’re realizing, oh, these are. These are the trips that have to happen, and how are we already not making that easier?

Not just for women, but for everybody. And I think that’s why we saw it. We’re seeing it increase. And I’m hoping even though, you know, in the US you’re experiencing a bit of a. Pause, let’s say it’ll come back,

I think we had this aha moment as advocates that we had been talking about this for a long time, that. Departments of transport and cities are so hyper-focused on the single purpose, long distance commute from the house to the office. It’s at the expense of all of those other myriad journeys that we take in a day that are maybe non-economic and there are related to care.

It’s only something like 16% of trips are. Work-related trips. So we ignore that at our peril, really. And they are, as Melissa said, often made by some combination of walking, cycling, and public transport. We don’t measure them, we don’t design for them. And it’s often those people, those trips are made silently suffering while.

Widening motorways and throwing infinite resources at making traffic jams a little bit more efficient. And, uh, that’s only gonna get you so far. We’re gonna eventually run out of money and, and space, and at some point we have to pivot and say, okay, what are the other journeys that are happening in our city and how can we support them?

And what are the lived experiences outside of our own? And that was the common thread, as you say, in a lot of the cities. That we spoke to and the perspectives that the women leaders brought was they had a very personal experience with, uh, being responsible for the care in their household. And so they brought that perspective and they prioritized that in their decision making.

And, and that’s how you get things like school streets and super blocks and good cycling infrastructure that connects to your public transport system. That only happens when you prioritize care in your neighborhood and in your community. So. We’re hoping to shine a light on that particular topic and give other people a similar aha moment.

I

And so those numbers are so huge. It’s, it’s very, uh, amazing that we haven’t actually pulled that to the surface.

Like it

Women aren’t succeeding and being lifted up to levels of decision making and leadership and why we have that gender gap that’s so prominent in our structures of government and other means of employment.

And it’s a very male dominated, as you mentioned in the book, and there are vested interests that are defending a system that works for them but doesn’t work for everybody. And I find that a really fascinating frame because of the amount of folks who fight in tooth and nail for a specific way of living, which is a lot of, in the US it’s a lot of driving and focused on getting around in your car.

But that is only good for so many people. Uh, we have had Ana VARs on the show, and you know, she puts the number at what, like I think 30% of people don’t drive at all.

And you know, Chris talked about how we’re not counting care trips, we’re also not counting the trips that people aren’t taking because they can’t drive, because they can’t access the system in the way that, you know, the people with the most options already can. We’re not taking them into account, but we’re also not taking into account that, you know, our lifetime, our experience is not linear.

We will constantly change in terms of how we can move. You know, when we’re children, we’re dependent usually on someone else, and similarly, at some point in our lives. We’ll either experience injury, health concerns we age, and the status quo way of designing right now, of thinking about those economic trips, of designing for the vested interest of getting in a car and moving as fast as possible.

We age out of that, quite frankly. And so if we’re not thinking about that, if we’re not designing for that, we are designing ourselves out of the system that we’re trying to build. And I think that’s, that’s the big thing that comes out of a lot of the themes is. You know, in thinking about others, in having that empathy, in listening to the lived experiences of people that are maybe not like us in terms of how they experience the world, and taking that into account in the planning process and thinking about cycling and walking networks and thinking about where cars go and where they don’t go.

You know, you are in effect creating a space that you can age more gracefully in or you can experience at the same. Quality. Even if you experience some health changes or or an injury or something, or you start a family, you know, all of these things, you can still experience the city in the same positive way.

And I think I’m gonna steal your anecdote, if that’s okay. The best example of that that I think Chris heard of when he was in China. Is there was, uh, an official that had spent decades designing a city for, you know, his neighborhood and his city for moving efficiently and effectively by car, making sure it was comfortable, fast, convenient.

It had

Like, well, yeah, this is what we’re doing. We are essentially designing the joy out of our lives when we wanna enjoy it the most.

And when that happens, we’re driver’s license taken away. And I saw this with my grandfather. You know you’re institutionalized, you are isolated in your house, you are dependent on others for transport and. One thing that we continue to tout is the Netherlands infrastructure here is not for the fit and break the cycling infrastructure is used the most by the 65 plus demographic, amazingly.

So for them it’s a continued means of participation in society and they get to, as Melissa say, age gracefully in their communities where they grow up instead of, yeah, being thrown to the sidelines and neglected and forgotten about. So. As Melissa continues to say, if we’re not designing with empathy in mind, we’re designing ourselves out of the system and eventually it catches up with all of us.

You know, like myself, I enjoyed a high level of freedom in terms of moving around my neighborhood when I was, yeah. School aged into my teen years, and even between myself and my sister, who’s seven years younger than me, noticing that difference starts to occur where. My parents wouldn’t have chauffeured me around.

My mom showed me how to use the bus when I was 12. My sister same age was starting to be chauffeured around a lot more because it was, they were uncomfortable for reasons, not just of traffic safety, but others. And, you know, having had that joy myself, it now influences how I approach and how these women that we profile approach their work in seeing, you know, their own children, our own children, not enjoy that same level of freedom.

And knowing the confidence that comes from that, this understanding of. You know, risk taking and, and learning what your limits are. When we take that away from the next generation, we’re really doing them a disservice, an incredible disservice that, you know, building from safe recycling, building school streets, thinking about play in our cities, not just to something that you have to drive a child to and is sort of in a cage or in a indoor jungle gym kind of thing.

But, you know, our children need this. Just for, you know, a, a high quality of childhood. And yeah, I think that really plays a role in how they approach, you know, just that idea of how people of all ages move through the city and how that requires, you know, more than just a car based focus.

Underneath these 11 stories in women changing cities is every one of these women were willing to stand up to the automotive industrial complex and, and challenge the car dominated thinking in their cities. And as Janet said, Khan famously said, one of the original women changing cities, um, when you fight the status quo, the status quo fights back hard.

I think, uh, every single one of these women found out very quickly that it was not going to be an easy battle. But one thing we heard from a lot of them was. You know, as a woman, I’m used to pissing people off and getting, you know, negative reactions and toxic feedback and criticism. So if I’m gonna get that either way, I may as well do something that has an impact.

And, and so this is also something that’s maybe common with the female experience as being used to being a lightning rod for criticism. Well, they can kind of use that as a cover and get done in the meantime, knowing that they were elected to do a job, not just to stay in a position and, and cut some ribbons and smile for the cameras to actually improve their cities.

And you know, I think time has shown that they were quite successful in a lot of those cases.

But it’s not like hitting a wall in a marathon. It’s like a, it’s very psychologically draining, which is I, I imagine doubly frustrating.

And unfortunately this just seems like the reality of making change happen in cities in the current period. And, uh, I don’t know how we put that genie back in the bottle, but, uh, one thing that we’re often saying now when we’re working with advocates and government officials is. You have to give the people who are leading the charge, cover and support to prepare them for this backlash and to maybe help them understand that this is not representative of the broader community.

The adage that we use and have heard time and time again is that. Opposition is so much more loud than permission and we often mistake intensive minorities for being representative of the broader community. And, and maybe it’s just a handful of people that have a lot of time and energy and, and are particularly passionate about this, but.

For elected officials, why would you put yourself and your family through that experience? It’s, it’s a question we need to ask ourselves. Running for elected office is one thing, but actually putting yourself through that grinder is another. And, and for a lot of people, the status quo might be very enticing, um, because it’s, it’s comfortable and it’s not gonna put them in their families in the cross hairs, so to speak.

Quite literally, in some cases.

I will do it to the best that I can, but when that energy is spent, when I’ve had enough. You know, then it’s time for me to go because it could be very easy if you’re experiencing that level of vitriol to suddenly become very bitter, very cynical, and. For no positive reasons, hold onto that position because you have that cynicism in you and you just wanna stick it to somebody else.

And I think that we’ve seen it with other women leaders that are not featured in the book, more global leaders. Um, but this understanding that I’m here, I will do the job that I can, but when that energy is spent, I will go and we see this in an algo announcing she will not run another term Valerie plant not running another term.

Lu Levine, also from Montreal deciding to step down because she also experienced quite fierce vitriol and even El Deran, who is still in her position in Brussels, saying, you know, it’s, it’s okay if it’s time for me to go, it’s time for me to go. And that it’s not necessarily an indictment that what I’ve done is not good enough.

It’s that I’ve done everything I can. And now it’s time for some new energy to come in. It’s time for someone else to take the baton, and I will be here to support them in the best way that I can. But for the sake of my health, my family’s health, I know when it’s time to step back and when it’s time to keep fighting.

You know, if you have the conviction and you show that conviction and people appreciate it, then you’ll get rewarded with reelection.

Their life experiences into actual change happening. And the way that I answered that was very simply put that it seems female leaders, female politicians, are much better at taking the pulse of their constituents, of knowing what is popular and unpopular in their city. It seems in general, politicians are really bad at gauging public opinion.

You know, they listen to the voices that are around them of people who are also in the same socioeconomic bubble that, again, people for whom the status quo typically works. And so they think that the idea of taking space away from cars, building bike infrastructure, good public transport is unpopular because it’s unpopular amongst their own social circles.

But if you go out there and. Talk to the community, meet people at their level. As you say, the permission is much quieter than opposition, but you’ll find that low traffic neighborhoods and, and these implementations, the idea of getting your kid to school safely and having choice when it comes to transportation are quietly quite popular and we’ll win you votes.

We just, uh, somehow we mistake the intensity of the opposition with quantity.

But we point out that these are also qualities that all genders can represent. And you mentioned Momani in terms of his success in understanding the pulse of what people in New York wanted. And you know, if you had looked at this and said, okay, well. People in New York just wanna move fast and they don’t want this tax that has been put on them.

And you know, they’re sick of the bike lanes. If you listen to, you know, the loudest voices on social media about, oh, bikes in New York. But then he understood that’s not the reality for most people. It’s not what they want. And he was successful as a result in showing that when you approach leadership from a place of understanding, of listening, of empathy, you can be successful and you can actually respond better to what people actually want.

This all informs so much. At the end of the day, I think what we hope people take from our work, including this book, is that we need those people at some sort of table, whether it’s the highest level decision making table or committees, or just in stakeholder engagement to understand, because we can only do so much and you know, we can approach our work with as much understanding and openness and listening as possible to try to bring all those perspectives in.

But unless we’re actually speaking to the people that experience this every day. There’s always a gap. And I think that’s one of the things we really wanted to highlight.

When he suddenly had a child and had to push a stroller through the city and how that changed his perspective. And of course he should be applauded for that and, and that will hopefully change his decision making process. But Melissa and I kind of looked at each other and said. Well, hold on a minute.

You know, up to that point, uh, had he just not thought about this and, and should it take a life-changing experience for people to think outside of their own lived experience. So I think that points to much like this other anecdote in Shanghai is we have implicit biases that are not conscious and they’re not purposeful and they’re not.

Necessarily Ill meaning, but they very much impact our priorities and the way we approach our jobs, and the more we can do to bring in other perspectives. The, the strength in diversity, and I know that’s a, a dirty word in 2026, but

These seem like the only ways out of the current political mess that we find ourselves in.

But until you have like a newborn or somebody you’re caring for that you’re going around the city, you start to see things. And I knew. Before that my neighborhood was called Stroller Valley, but I didn’t like really see all the kids until, you know, we were outside at the same times as other kids would be outside.

Or we go to the local plaza at five o’clock on a Friday and it’s a party and there’s just like hundreds of kids, whereas people think that San Francisco is childless.

And so I feel like the social proof is a little bit helpful getting people into those situations. That’s why last week we had on, on a Z Arts hosting a show about the week without driving where they. Get elected officials to basically get rid of their cars for a week and experience the world like other people do.

And even if you can put people in situations where they can accumulate that knowledge by participating, it seems like that’s a benefit. And I feel like that’s one of the things that we might need to do more of is like organize in a way that allows people to get, you know, and give them your book, for example.

Or take them and have them live life in somebody else’s shoes for a little while and maybe they’ll wake up and have that glass break moment.

And that’s important. You’re absolutely right. It, it changes your perspective. But I think one thing that I’ve heard from disability advocates is that it helps to build that empathy, to build that understanding. You know, what Chris does with his work is you bring elected officials here and get them on a bike, and suddenly they see the world differently.

Very important experience. I think the thing is that it can’t just be that. Mm-hmm. It has to also be talking to the people that do this every day. ’cause one day, a week, a month, you know, experiencing this is very different from a lifetime. Right. And navigating a city. With an impairment or, or as a parent or as a woman, you know, as much as, uh, you and Chris could try.

You’ll never experience the world the way I do. It’s just no way. Um, and so while those experiences help to inform and make you see things differently, we still need to have those voices at the table. We still need women. In decision making and leadership positions, same as queer folks, same as people with disabilities.

Having them involved and having children and older adults also involved in these moments because this is their daily life and they will know the nuances. That one day experience or a week’s experience will only briefly shine a light on for others. They will be able to say, well, every day, or in the winter, or at night, this is my experience.

It’s nice that you understand. This aspect, but there’s a bigger picture. And so I think that’s the thing that we really wanna emphasize in our work and in the writing that we do, is that it’s so important that we have these voices involved in the conversations as well.

Uh, story of, of success, whether it’s bike lanes or playgrounds or whatever it might be.

I mean, it’s a very. Chaotic unplanned city that popped up almost overnight post-communist and has something like 500,000 illegally built buildings and no master plan public spaces, and even in that kind of chaotic. Situation, they’ve, they’ve carved out now in recent years, a beautiful series of playgrounds of school streets of cycling, infrastructure of traffic gardens to cycling schools, of off street park spaces where the kids can learn how to cycle and use the streets safely.

So putting children front and center, deputy Mayor and Willa Reini has. Really accomplished a lot with very few resources and in a very unlikely part of the world. And so I think when we hear again, we don’t have the money or the will to do your gold plated Amsterdam, uh, ideas, we will often point to context like Tarana heard quietly doing it for very little capital except for political capital.

You know, working as a consultant, working with engineers, there’s a lot of focus on quantitative data. There’s all this like, okay, well how many people are moving? Or what are, when are they going, what are exactly the distances of trips they’re taking? It’s so like. Precise and the data is always part of this conversation in transportation planning.

And of course it has a place, but in, in the work that I do, it’s so much more focused on the qualitative. It’s about the experience. And I think with the safety Pin app and the work that they’ve been able to do in terms of not doing trip counting, but rather. Where you felt unsafe, not necessarily where an incident took place, but places where you have this feeling of discomfort and how is that making you avoid certain routes?

Using that qualitative information to then translate it into data that can influence change to address areas where there wasn’t enough lighting that wasn’t enough seating. You know, for me it’s this evidence that yes, qualitative data is subjective. It’s very hard to acquire in a lot of ways, but when done.

In a meaningful way can be quite powerful. And I think that’s, yeah, that’s kind of what I take from that.

And so we’ve brought safety pin to the table and it may be that they adapt some kind of, uh, crowds. Source tool to start identifying where these spaces are and addressing them in a systemic way. So this is just for the proof that cities can learn from each other. And if deli’s teaching Amsterdam something, then I think that’s a beautiful thing.

What is the common denominator? You know, what is the secret that we can bring to other cities? And I think, you know, we do find that in terms of the lessons learned, but not in the way. That I think we thought we were going to, and I, I can’t articulate what that is, but just I think there were stories that came out that maybe we weren’t expecting.

And I think that common thread, I don’t think we expected there to be such a common thread between all of the stories. We know that a lot of what happens around the world takes context from another city or, or, you know, we’re all finding inspiration from each other. It’s the work that Chris and I do in terms of.

Trying to convince cities. There are ideas and lessons you can take from the Netherlands and apply in any city, but to know that, whether it’s Paris or Bogota or Manila or Sydney, there’s all this commonality in terms of just a different way that we should be approaching change in leadership. And I know that there’s commonalities, but I think it was a little bit surprising in terms of how similar know when we sat down and like, well, what are the lessons that we can take from this that we can now pass on?

I don’t think we expected it to be like every single chapter you can pull out that empathy was important, the work of care, the alliances, the impact over power. That was part of every single story.

This time around, we had no idea. We just kind of, as Melissa said, had a thesis question and we did these 19 interviews having absolutely no idea where we would ultimately end up. And I think a lot of it fell into place as expected. But as Melissa also said this, a lot kind of surprised us. And I think the biggest surprise was, as she said, how universal every woman’s experiences was.

We maybe expected 10 or 15. Leadership qualities to draw from at the end of the day by asking the same set of questions to the same 19 women. But the fact that we could only identify five, that that five really jumped out from every single woman that we spoke to, just, um, yeah. Speaks to how common their experiences were.

And I think the other thing that really surprised me is how I wasn’t expecting this, how selfless every single woman that we spoke to was. And we try also to capture this in the book, but. When we sat down with a lot of them, including Mayor Hidalgo, you know, they didn’t want to talk about their personal victories and accomplishments and they didn’t really wanna talk so much about bike lanes and school streets and, you know, all the physical interventions that they had done.

They wanted to talk about. Lift up the team around them that had supported them to champion other women that were thinking of getting into politics or having a hard time being into politics. For them, it was about the broader topic of getting more women into leadership and, and supporting the women around them.

And it was very telling that they never used first person narrative. It wasn’t I, me, I, me, it was always we, us. And I think that’s, again, it’s a very beautiful thing and, and it’s something we try to capture in the book, but not certainly something maybe at least I was expecting at the very start because I am used to this very kind of ego, self-driven world.

The masculine, uh, look at me, I’ve done all of this stuff, and. Yeah. Again, I think we need less ego in, in the urbanism community and well, and my mind goes to, and I won’t mention which city it was in, but we made the mistake of interviewing one of the women’s predecessor just on background to try and get some broader context.

And, um, he sat down and monologued for 75 minutes about. His accomplishments, all the things that he had done and she was taking credit for. And after we were done, Melissa and I just looked at each other and went like, whoa, what the heck was that? And, and we will not subject ourselves to that again because uh, I think it was quite telling it how.

In this world of politics that people bring very different priorities and perspectives to the table.

Teams or in. Meetings where I’m like, what is happening? Stop talking like it’s not about you. It’s about the broader collective. But yeah, it was for me, maybe a bit of a relief ’cause I’m like, oh, we don’t have to do all the interviews like this, do we? But yeah, it’s, it was definitely that sort of reinforcement of why it was so important that we were telling the stories, or at least researching the stories that we were.

And I wanna caveat that ’cause I feel it’s imperative that women always caveat that. This is not all men. And we know a lot of wonderful men who do approach their work from a place of humility, of empathy. And there’s countless examples. I always come to the example in Gantt,

And the first time I met him, he took me on a bike tour and was talking about this idea of we do what we do because of these experiences and these stories that we’ve heard from the community and you know, so it’s not just. We need only women in leadership. We just need to value those people that think beyond themselves and their personal gain and for what can be a gain for society instead.

I think it’s important to note that it is, uh, the price point is a little bit higher than people might be used to, but that is for good reason. You know, there’s 160 full color photographs in the book. We purposely made this a visual experience because these stories of urban transformation are visual.

They’re about good public space, good infrastructure, and we really wanted to capture that. But, uh. Yeah, wherever fine books are sold and you know, we are out on the road as much as we can trying to promote this. So if folks are interested in organizing event, they’re most welcome to, uh, visit our website and get in touch.

It’s modacitylife.com.

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