The ABC of Women's vision and practices for prosperous, inclusive, resilient and peaceful urban futures

The event will bring together leaders of relevant women's and youth's groups, grassroots, at international, regional and local levels, several regional governments, activists, researchers and urban experts, to exchange on youth and women's practices and strategies for the promotion of the links between urbanization, culture and innovation as a basis for achieving inclusive, safe, resilient, peaceful and sustainable cities and human settlements. The pandemic crisis has made evident the pending issues and the structural problems of sustainability: the environmental fragility of ecosystems, human frailties, especially of the elderly, people with disabilities, the homeless, migrants, the lack of risk planning and its impacts, starting with gender, lack of public or affordable housing, and proximity services. In this context, the post-pandemic is an opportunity that cannot be missed for a season of new visions of cities that focus on the right of all to live in humane, fair, inclusive, safe and sustainable settlements. For this reason, it is not possible to propose old recipes, but it is necessary to experiment with new paths and identify new subjects to guide them. It is time to start again from women’s realities and with women. From an urbanism of everyday life, the city of care, and with an intersectional gender perspective relying on approaches that put people at the center of planning. The participants in the event will discuss the new words necessary to interpret places, contexts, needs, in an innovative way, to build a grammar with which to structure actions for cities that change the quality of life of the people who live in them. Women have many new words to offer: accessibility, flexibility, multifunctionality, proximity, temporality, intergeneration, intersectionality, creativity, security, participation, multiculturalism, blending, peace, just to name a few. The event aims thus, at enriching the ongoing construction of a new GRAMMAR and an ABCD for the implementation of the New Urban Agenda and the achievement of the urban goals of the 2030 Agenda. In this sense, it will be structured in three panels: the FIRST panel will focus on a general discussion on the new alphabet, the SECOND, to the terms, because the technical and professional language communicates often in an asymmetrical way and is not always simple and easy for the person who is not an epert in the field, and it is even more difficult for women. The THIRD panel will address the topic of the construction of the full inclusion of refugee populations also through the planning and design of the temporary use of the city's spaces and of peace, at a time when Europe is also threatened by serious conflict. Words are used to learn, to communicate and they have great power, which increases with their greater knowledge. Those who know more words have more power and are more likely to modify and help change reality because they know how to describe and interpret it.