Making Spaces Safer


Book Description

Shawna Potter has been a touring musician for over twenty years--and has been sexually harassed for just as long. Here's her DIY guide to fighting back.




Re-Conceptualizing Safe Spaces


Book Description

This book broadens the idea of a safe space that is traditionally discussed in feminist studies, to include gendered identities intersecting with class, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and ability within multiple aspects of education. This collection showcases work supporting access to education of persistently marginalized individuals.




Stop Street Harassment


Book Description

Using groundbreaking studies, news stories, and interviews, this book underscores that there will never be gender equity until men stop harassing women in public spaces—and it details strategies for achieving this goal. Street harassment is generally dismissed as harmless, but in reality, it causes women to feel unsafe in public, at least sometimes. To achieve true gender equality, it must come to an end. Stop Street Harassment: Making Public Places Safe and Welcoming for Women draws on academic studies, informal surveys, news articles, and interviews with activists to explore the practice's definition and prevalence, the societal contexts in which it occurs, and the role of factors such as race and sexual orientation. Perhaps more crucially, the book makes clear how women experience street harassment—how they feel about and respond to it—and the ways it negatively impacts lives. But understanding is only a beginning. In the second half of the book, readers will find concrete strategies for dealing with street harassers and ways to become involved in working to end this all-too-common violation. Educators, counselors, parents, and other concerned individuals will discover resources for teaching about harassment and modeling behavior that will help prevent harassment incidents.




Feminist City


Book Description

Feminist City is an ongoing experiment in living differently, living better, and living more justly in an urban world. We live in the city of men. Our public spaces are not designed for female bodies. There is little consideration for women as mothers, workers or carers. The urban streets often are a place of threats rather than community. Gentrification has made the everyday lives of women even more difficult. What would a metropolis for working women look like? A city of friendships beyond Sex and the City. A transit system that accommodates mothers with strollers on the school run. A public space with enough toilets. A place where women can walk without harassment. In Feminist City, through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities built into our cities, homes, and neighborhoods. Kern offers an alternative vision of the feminist city. Taking on fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, and the joys and perils of being alone, Kern maps the city from new vantage points, laying out an intersectional feminist approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future. It is time to dismantle what we take for granted about cities and to ask how we can build more just, sustainable, and women-friendly cities together.




Safe Enough Spaces


Book Description

From the president of Wesleyan University, a compassionate and provocative manifesto on the crises confronting higher education In this bracing book, Michael S. Roth stakes out a pragmatist path through the thicket of issues facing colleges today to carry out the mission of higher education. With great empathy, candor, subtlety, and insight, Roth offers a sane approach to the noisy debates surrounding affirmative action, political correctness, and free speech, urging us to envision college as a space in which students are empowered to engage with criticism and with a variety of ideas. Countering the increasing cynical dismissal—from both liberals and conservatives—of the traditional core values of higher education, this book champions the merits of different diversities, including intellectual diversity, with a timely call for universities to embrace boldness, rigor, and practical idealism.




Walkable City Rules


Book Description

“Cities are the future of the human race, and Jeff Speck knows how to make them work.” —David Owen, staff writer at the New Yorker Nearly every US city would like to be more walkable—for reasons of health, wealth, and the environment—yet few are taking the proper steps to get there. The goals are often clear, but the path is seldom easy. Jeff Speck’s follow-up to his bestselling Walkable City is the resource that cities and citizens need to usher in an era of renewed street life. Walkable City Rules is a doer’s guide to making change in cities, and making it now. The 101 rules are practical yet engaging—worded for arguments at the planning commission, illustrated for clarity, and packed with specifications as well as data. For ease of use, the rules are grouped into 19 chapters that cover everything from selling walkability, to getting the parking right, escaping automobilism, making comfortable spaces and interesting places, and doing it now! Walkable City was written to inspire; Walkable City Rules was written to enable. It is the most comprehensive tool available for bringing the latest and most effective city-planning practices to bear in your community. The content and presentation make it a force multiplier for place-makers and change-makers everywhere.




The Art of Gathering


Book Description

"Hosts of all kinds, this is a must-read!" --Chris Anderson, owner and curator of TED From the host of the New York Times podcast Together Apart, an exciting new approach to how we gather that will transform the ways we spend our time together—at home, at work, in our communities, and beyond. In The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker argues that the gatherings in our lives are lackluster and unproductive--which they don't have to be. We rely too much on routine and the conventions of gatherings when we should focus on distinctiveness and the people involved. At a time when coming together is more important than ever, Parker sets forth a human-centered approach to gathering that will help everyone create meaningful, memorable experiences, large and small, for work and for play. Drawing on her expertise as a facilitator of high-powered gatherings around the world, Parker takes us inside events of all kinds to show what works, what doesn't, and why. She investigates a wide array of gatherings--conferences, meetings, a courtroom, a flash-mob party, an Arab-Israeli summer camp--and explains how simple, specific changes can invigorate any group experience. The result is a book that's both journey and guide, full of exciting ideas with real-world applications. The Art of Gathering will forever alter the way you look at your next meeting, industry conference, dinner party, and backyard barbecue--and how you host and attend them.




Right of Way


Book Description

The face of the pedestrian safety crisis looks a lot like Ignacio Duarte-Rodriguez. The 77-year old grandfather was struck in a hit-and-run crash while trying to cross a high-speed, six-lane road without crosswalks near his son’s home in Phoenix, Arizona. He was one of the more than 6,000 people killed while walking in America in 2018. In the last ten years, there has been a 50 percent increase in pedestrian deaths. The tragedy of traffic violence has barely registered with the media and wider culture. Disproportionately the victims are like Duarte-Rodriguez—immigrants, the poor, and people of color. They have largely been blamed and forgotten. In Right of Way, journalist Angie Schmitt shows us that deaths like Duarte-Rodriguez’s are not unavoidable “accidents.” They don’t happen because of jaywalking or distracted walking. They are predictable, occurring in stark geographic patterns that tell a story about systemic inequality. These deaths are the forgotten faces of an increasingly urgent public-health crisis that we have the tools, but not the will, to solve. Schmitt examines the possible causes of the increase in pedestrian deaths as well as programs and movements that are beginning to respond to the epidemic. Her investigation unveils why pedestrians are dying—and she demands action. Right of Way is a call to reframe the problem, acknowledge the role of racism and classism in the public response to these deaths, and energize advocacy around road safety. Ultimately, Schmitt argues that we need improvements in infrastructure and changes to policy to save lives. Right of Way unveils a crisis that is rooted in both inequality and the undeterred reign of the automobile in our cities. It challenges us to imagine and demand safer and more equitable cities, where no one is expendable.




Healthy Child Healthy World


Book Description

Learn how to create a cleaner, greener, safer home with Christopher Gavigan and the trusted experts at Healthy Child Healthy World. Healthy Child Healthy World is the essential guide for parents! All parents want a happy and healthy child in a safe home, but where do they start? It starts with the small steps to creating a healthier, less toxic, and more environmentally sound home, and this is the definitive book to get you there. Unfortunately, tens of millions of Americans, overwhelmingly children, now face chronic disease and illnesses including cancer, autism, asthma, allergies, birth defects, ADD/ADHD, obesity/diabetes, and learning and developmental disabilities. The number gets higher each year and more parents ask WHY? Scientific evidence increasingly finds chemicals in everyday products like cleaning supplies, beauty care and cosmetics, home furnishings, plastics, food, and even toys that are contributors to these ailments. The good news is that you can something to protect your children with a few simple changes! Inside, you'll find practical, inexpensive, and easy lifestyle advice for every stage of parenting including: *Advice on preparing a nontoxic nursery for a new baby *What every expectant mom needs to do to have a safer pregnancy *Clarifying which plastics and baby products to avoid and the healthier solutions *Tips to take to the grocery store, including the most and least pesticide-laden fruits and vegetables and the best healthy kid-approved snacks *Which beauty care / cosmetic products pose the biggest risk to health *The best recipes for healthy snacks, low-cost and safe homemade cleaners, and non-toxic art supplies *How to easily minimize allergens, dust, and lead *A greener garden, yard, and outdoor spaces *Tips to keep your pets healthy, and the unwanted pests out naturally *Renovation ideas, naturally fresher indoor air, and safer sleeping options, *An 27 page extensive shopper's guide to most trusted and best products every home needs Inside is also packed with over 40 featured contributions from renowned doctors, environmental scientists, and public-health experts like Dr. Harvey Karp, Dr Philip Landrigan, and William McDonough, as well as many celebrity parents like Gwyneth Paltrow, Tobey Maguire, Sheryl Crow, Erin Brockovich and Tom Hanks. A special featured contribution from First Lady Michelle Obama on her best ways of coping with her daughter's asthma.




Making Public Places Safer


Book Description

The United Kingdom has more than 4.2 million public closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras-one for every fourteen citizens. Across the United States, hundreds of video surveillance systems are being installed in town centers, public transportation facilities, and schools at a cost exceeding $100 million annually. And now other Western countries have begun to experiment with CCTV to prevent crime in public places. In light of this expansion and the associated public expenditure, as well as pressing concerns about privacy rights, there is an acute need for an evidence-based approach to inform policy and practice. Drawing on the highest-quality research, criminologists Brandon C. Welsh and David P. Farrington assess the effectiveness and social costs of not only CCTV, but also of other important surveillance methods to prevent crime in public space, such as improved street lighting, security guards, place managers, and defensible space. Importantly, the book goes beyond the question of "Does it work?" and examines the specific conditions and contexts under which these surveillance methods may have an effect on crime as well as the mechanisms that bring about a reduction in crime. At a time when cities need cost-effective methods to fight crime and the public gradually awakens to the burdens of sacrificing their privacy and civil rights for security, Welsh and Farrington provide this timely and reliable guide to the most effective and non-invasive uses of surveillance to make public places safer from crime.