How women have shaped our global cities

Octavia Hill – (1838 – 1912)
Improved quality of life in Victorian London

Appalled by the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions of the 19th century slums that housed much of London’s working class, Octavia Hill came up with a new and improved model in which housing was about more than bricks and mortar. In her role as a landlord, she took the time to get to know tenants and personally collected rent. After paying investors their promised 5 percent return, the rest of the money was spent on maintaining and improving the properties. The model proved successful for all involved and by 1874 she had 15 housing schemes providing homes to around 3,000 tenants. 
Hill also believed strongly in the importance of open spaces including parks, gardens and playgrounds for London’s growing population. She campaigned against development on suburban woodlands in the expanding city, and joined the fight to save London's Hampstead Heath and Parliament Hill Fields from being built on. Both remain as open spaces for Londoners today.

Julia Morgan – (1872 – 1957)
Introduced better leisure amenities for women in California

The first woman to be granted an architect’s licence in California, Julia Morgan used her skills to redesign the concept of living and leisure spaces for women within the Western coast of the US.   After graduating from the architecture section of Paris’ Ecole des Beaux-Arts – the first woman to do so - in 1902, she returned home to work on more than 700 buildings during her 40year career. These included numerous projects for the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), the construction of Hearst Castle – a country house for the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst - and hundreds of homes, churches and office buildings across the Bay area following the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

Leisure facilities such as gyms and swimming pools featured strongly in her overall designs, giving women who were just beginning to enjoy growing social freedom more opportunities in their free time. Morgan is also credited with creating “the most sumptuous swimming pool on earth” at Hearst Castle – a lavish marble pool surrounded by an ancient Roman temple façade.

Jane Jacobs – (1916 – 2006)
Overhauled urban planning in America’s cities 

A pioneer of urban planning, Jane Jacobs has left her mark on cities across America. Despite having no formal architecture training, her work as a journalist allowed her to observe the street life and workings of New York City in the late 1930s and 40s before she joined the staff on Architectural Forum, where she increasingly saw the flaws in conventional planning practices. Her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities details her criticisms on how policies were sending many city neighborhoods into decline. Instead she advocated, building cities around people and how they live their daily lives with the importance of parks, pavements, mixed-use developments and bottom-up community planning.

Honor Chapman – (1942 – 2009)
Strengthened London’s position as an international business destination

A renowned figure in developing modern real estate research, former JLL partner Honor Chapman also left her mark on the urban environment. She acted as an advisor for the redevelopment of Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz shortly after the Berlin Wall came down as well as playing a key role in the regeneration of Cardiff Bay.
Yet it was London where her influence was strongest. After a 1992 report showing big areas for improvement in the capital’s ability to attract international businesses, Chapman founded Think London (initially called London First Centre), which has since helped hundreds of companies to successfully set up operations in the city. She went on to become a founding member and later chair of the London Development Agency and was also involved in improving infrastructure in the capital serving on the board of Transport for London.

Cheong Koon Hean – (1957 – onwards)
Leading urban projects at the heart of modern Singapore

Many of Singapore’s landmark attractions and its publically-owned residential developments have felt the influence of Cheong Koon Hean. An architect by training, Cheong’s long career in urban planning has seen her become the first woman to lead Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority, where she took charge of a number of key urban transformation projects including the Jurong Lake District, the remaking of Orchard Road and the successful Marina Bay area, a magnet for tourists and locals alike.
Since 2010, Cheong has headed up Singapore’s Housing and Development Board, which is responsible for housing more than 80 percent of the city state’s population. Her vision for the future of the housing landscape in the city-state centers round sustainable, affordable and well-designed homes as outlined in the HBD’s Roadmap for Better Living. In 2016, she was awarded the Urban Land Institute’s J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development.

Janette Sadik-Khan – (1960 – onwards)
Revamped the streets of New York City

As the Transportation Commissioner for one of America’s biggest cities, Sadik-Kahn transformed New York’s roads to make them a safer and friendlier place for pedestrians and cyclists. During her six-year stint, she oversaw the construction of almost 400 miles of bike lanes, launched Citi Bike, America’s largest bike share network and created more than 60 pedestrian plazas. Public transport was also high on Sadik-Khan’s priority list with seven new rapid bus routes helping to shuttle people across the city.

After leaving the Department of Transportation in 2013, Sadik-Khan now works at philanthropic consultancy Bloomberg Associates advising mayors in global cities on ways to boost quality of life for local residents.

Zhang Xin (1965 – onwards)
Transforming commercial property markets in Beijing and Shanghai

One of China’s top property billionaires, Zhang Xin has spent the last two decades developing some of Beijing’s prime office addresses. Her company, SOHO China, run in partnership with her husband Pan Shiyi, has collaborated with star architects such as Zaha Hadid to create some of the city’s landmark buildings including Galaxy SOHO, a series of four curved structures, linked by bridges and platforms and Wangjing SOHO, a three-tower complex designed to look like mountains.
Known as the “woman who built Beijing”, Zhang started life in a concrete tenement in the Chinese capital before spells studying economics in England and working on IPOs at Goldman Sachs. Spotting the burgeoning opportunities in China during the mid-1990s, Zhang and Pan laid the foundations for their property empire, which today includes coworking spaces and mixed use developments across both Beijing and Shanghai.

Tanya Muller – (1973 – onwards)
Making Mexico City a cleaner, greener place to live

Cleaning up the streets of Mexico City falls to Tanya Müller, a politician with big ambitions to make the most populous metropolitan area in the Western Hemisphere a much greener place. She has been spearheading Plan Verde which includes a variety of environmental objectives including encouraging the construction of green roofs and increasing the number of people using public transport by expanding the city’s bus system and boosting investment in its bike sharing system. 
While Müller efforts may be largely focused on cutting pollution and congestion in Mexico City, she’s also staying tuned to the developments in other parts of the world as the founding director of World Urban Parks and founder and Vice President of the World Green Infrastructure Network, which promotes green infrastructure in different countries.