By Mitali Parekh, Jane Borges, Yusra Husain, Heena Khandelwal and Nidhi Lodaya

Let’s reimagine BKC as a mixed-use place with a 24x7 urban environment
Working towards gender mainstreaming through urban development plans
Vision Creator: Prathima Manohar, urbanist, specialist architect in place activation and co-founder, PlaceXplore

All women, says Prathima Manohar, are hyper aware of the way they experience the spaces that they inhabit. As a 22-year-old architect, when Manohar moved from Bengaluru to work in Mumbai, she remembers finding the city “liberating”. But early on in her career, while working on a video documentary on Dharavi, she realised how young girls living there would plan their day, based on access to toilets. “I grew up in a post-feminist era, where I did not face any discrimination. But that did not mean my experience was a shared one,” she says. Later, when collaborating with ElsaMarie D’Silva, founder of Red Dot Foundation and president of Red Dot Foundation Global, (Safecity), for the Safecity app, Manohar sensed the urgency of creating an inclusive, women-first city. The platform collects and analyses crowdsourced, anonymous reports of sexual violence, identifying patterns and key insights. “The data that emerged showed hotspots of violence. And that made a big difference, indicating a parallel between the kind of infra being designed and where we were noticing more violence,” she shares.