Turnbull’s thinktank, Committee for Sydney, is pushing for planners and designers to ensure women and children can get the most out of cities

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

The chair of the thinktank Committee for Sydney, Lucy Turnbull, has called on city planners and designers to make building female-friendly cities a core component of urban renewal.

“If a city is female-friendly, it is friendly for everybody,” Turnbull told Fairfax Media in an interview published on Sunday.

“It’s not an exclusionary idea of female-friendly, but to ensure that women and young children ... are able to fully participate in the life of the city and the economy of the city.”

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Turnbull, who in 2003 became the first female lord mayor of Sydney, is partnering through the Committee for Sydney with a global engineering and planning firm, Arup, to establish the mechanisms necessary to make cities more inclusive.

A female-friendly city is one where women’s perspectives are central to the design process, and where women can safely access services such as healthcare, public transport, social services, and education with the same ease and opportunity as men.

Turnbull told Fairfax how it was a mission to transport her now 33-year-old son, Alex, around the city of Sydney in a pram when he was a baby. “Sometimes you see extremely glamorous designer pavements that are completely impassable,” she said.

“I’ve been passionately interested and involved in cities, and particularly Sydney ... It’s a very important part of my life.”

A number of projects are under way around the world examining how to make cities more inclusive for women, such as the Women-Friendly City Project in Seoul, and the Women Friendly Cities United Nations Joint Programme, a five-year project across eight cities designed to increase safety; prevent and reduce violence; and to empower women’s groups, youth and children’s advocates to shape their environments.

Turnbull said it was important to design “smart cities” with strong public transport systems and housing accessibility and affordability.

These would be areas of focus for the Committee for Sydney over the next few years, Turnbull said, as the independent thinktank collaborated with universities, not-for-profit organisations, the private sector and governments to make Sydney more liveable.

She has almost two decades experience in cities and urban planning, having become deputy mayor of the City of Sydney in 1999 before her elevation to lord mayor in 2003.

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Turnbull said she saw no reason to cut back on her role with the Committee for Sydney just because of her husband, Malcolm Turbull, was recently made prime minister. She also rejected the term “first lady”, saying her role had not changed just because of his new position.

“This is the 21st century,” she told Fairfax. “I just consider myself to be the PM’s wife or partner. First lady is sort of, it sounds too official to me. I plan to do what I am doing now, as long as there are no pecuniary [interests] or conflicts between Malcolm’s role and what I do.”

Among many roles in her illustrious career, Turnbull has also served as chairman of the cancer treatment company Prima BioMed, was on the boards of the Biennale of Sydney, the National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Australian Museum and the Sydney festival, and is a former director of the private investment bank, Turnbull and Partners.