18. Sex* and the city (*gender)

On this week's podcast, we're talking gender. Which of course is not actually the same as sex – the former is social, the latter biological – but until such time as HBO makes a hit sitcom called “Gender and the City”, this is our title and we're sticking to it. Anyway. This week's guests: Caroline Criado-Perez is the writer, journalist and feminist campaigner, who wrote a fantastic feature for us on why cities need to take women into account when planning. She gives us a whistlestop tour of her findings, from playgrounds in Vienna to toilets in Mumbai. Lauren Elkin is the author of Flâneuse: The (Feminine) Art of Walking in Cities, recently serialised on BBC Radio 4. She tells Stephanie about the origins of the book, and why walking can be a radical act. Sarah Coughlan and Marissa Santikarn are two-thirds of the Berlinials podcast. They tell us about the joys and hassles of ex-pat Berlin. Lastly, Stephanie and I discuss how her experiences of London differ from mine (most notably: I get cat-called surprisingly rarely). And we talk about how cities could be made more welcoming for women. Skylines is the podcast from CityMetric, the New Statesman cities site. It's presented by Jonn Elledge and Stephanie Boland, and is a Roifield Brown production.