Cities & Health will develop ‘Healthy Women and Girls, Healthy Cities’ as an intrinsic theme within the journal.  In this “Decade of Impact” as we focus on realizing the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, we will be supporting those exploring the link between cities and health for women and girls in the global South and North. Gender inequalities contribute to health inequalities around the world. The journal will focus on the experience, creation, design and management of place from the female perspective, recognizing too that there are very significant variations in the experiences of women and girls depending on location, ethnicity, economic status, age, religion and other characteristics.

We welcome academic, community and practitioner contributions exploring these issues. We encourage discussions and evaluations of interventions, policies and approaches which deal explicitly with the health and well-being of women and girls living in urban areas. A series of themes and issues are set out below as a starting point for submissions.

If you have an interest in this theme and would like to support, shape and contribute, there are three things you can do:

1. Sign up as a peer reviewer for the journal,
   so that we can develop a network of experts able to review submissions on these topics. Please remember to include ‘women and girls’ in your key words when you register. More information about becoming a reviewer is available here: https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/cities-health-call-for-reviewers
2. Tell your networks about this initiative,
   and share on social media using the hashtag: #WGI (Women & girls initiative)
3. Prepare your manuscript,
   and submit your work for publication.

 Thematic background and key questions

• Demography, age and health:
  • What does healthy-ageing-in-place look like for women?
  • How do the spatial determinants of health particularly impact women and girls?
• The role of health technologies and informatics:
  • How can digital technologies be leveraged to support health for women and girls?
  • Can population health informatics be utilized to influence health behaviors and outcomes in the urban public realm?
• The intersection of design, health, wellbeing, and technology:
  • How can planning and design professionals facilitate and promote the health and wellbeing of women and girls?
  • How can female built environment professionals make their voices heard?
• Transportation:
  • How are the needs of women and girls captured in data gathering exercises?
  • Are the needs of women and girls taken into account in transport policy and infrastructure design ?
• Climate breakdown and ecological extinction:
  • What are the impacts on the health and well-being of women and girls?
  • How are women responding in the face of these threats?
• Urbanization and wellbeing:
• • What is the state-of-the-art understanding of health risks and social vulnerability in cities?
  • What processes can tame the worst of health and health equity impacts?
• Innovation and systems thinking in cities:
  • How can we manage hindrance and support for health and health equity?
  • What innovation, e-tools, and open source data can planning and design professionals and decision-makers envision?
• Spatial data and knowledge requirements:
  • Can we respond to the need for current, accurate, and more available data on the health of women and girls?
  • How do we gather the data we need to create sustainable interventions and make good policy decisions?
• Other topical cultural, social and political issues
  • Learning from the role of migration, security, disaster and recovery
  • Sanitation in the health economy of women and girls: safe access to sanitation and menstrual health

Cities & Health has been established to support human and planetary health by sharing the latest international research and practice for urban health and health equity. Our mission is to provide practitioners, researchers and communities with a platform to share, discuss problems to shape solutions from a spatial planning, urban design and physical city governance perspective.

Submit a Manuscript

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For Cities & Health:

Yonette Thomas, Associate Editor for Women and Girls, ythomas@yfthomasdr.com

Caroline J. Brown, Senior Editor, C.J.Brown@hw.ac.uk

Partner organisations supporting this special theme

Women’s Economic Imperative (WEI) – www.weiforward.org Margo Thomas

Pan African Women in Health (PAWH) – www.pawh.org, Belinda Ngongo 

Additional partners to be confirmed.

Theme editors:

Luzmila Argueta, Medicus Mundi, El Salvador

Marija Babovic, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade

Mei-Po Kwan, Geography and Resource Management, Chinese University of Hong Kong

Belinda Ngongo, Pan African Women in Health, Johannesburg, South Africa

Patricia Odero, Duke Global Health Innovation Center

Alice Ojwang, Nutrition and Dietetic Faculty, The Technical University of Kenya

Barbara J. Orser, Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa

Margo Thomas, Women’s Economic Imperative; Global Solutions Summit

Emmanuel Tsekleves, Design for Health, University of Lancaster