Fighting for a Feminist City in Glasgow: How to move from activism to policy

This story starts with a book: Feminist City: Claiming space in a man-made world by Leslie Kern. Holly Bruce, Scottish Greens Councillor for Langside in Glasgow, picked it up during lockdown.

“Leslie did a great job of painting a picture of what it’s like to be a woman living within a city. It got me thinking about my local park,” says Bruce in an interview for The Developer Podcast.

“During the winter months in the evening that wasn’t a space that I was able to enter... There’s a perception that women aren’t allowed to be in that space, and there’s an internalised perception that it’s unsafe.”

The book was “the catalyst” for Bruce, who shifted from reflection to action. She joined a women’s collective in 2021 and went on to win funding for a research project from Young Women Lead which centred the experience of women and non-binary people in Glasgow and made recommendations for busses and public parks.

Whereas some initiatives end with a white paper, Bruce kept pushing: “We wanted to get this embedded into policy,” says Bruce, to put a feminist lens on the local development plan and change “how we process data, look at consultation and how we hear from women.”

In 2022, Bruce led a successful motion for feminist town planning to be written into policy, which saw Glasgow become the first “Feminist City” in the UK.

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Getting the feminist city motion passed involved “relentless” effort, Bruce says – and she sees using the word ‘feminist’ as key to gaining the momentum, press coverage and cross-party support needed to make it happen. 

“The response was overwhelmingly positive and I think that is because I used the term feminism,” says Bruce. “Ultimately it got cross-party support across the board – councillors and officers within loads of different departments within the council, parks, transport, planning and violence against women and girls.”

What began in Glasgow is now spreading: In May 2025, Scottish Greens Councillor Kayleigh O’Neill successfully passed a motion to promote feminist urban planning in Edinburgh.

“I genuinely think if I’d said ’gender mainstreaming’ there would not have been this swell of interest,” says Bruce, referring to the term adopted by the UN in 1995 and popularised by Vienna which began adopting feminist urbanism in the 1980s. “Framing it this way brings people along with us and it secured the cross-party momentum needed to get this into policy.”

“There has obviously been backlash from using the word feminism, but I think that’s why we should use it all the more – it is so empowering.”  

The fight for feminist cities is not over – Bruce says the struggle continues to win budget and justify costs and initiatives to tackle issues such as night-time lighting in parks and public toilet provision.

“There is lots of hostility,” says Bruce. “I don’t think it’s anything to do with the policy; I think it’s playing politics, and that is unfortunate because we have a cross-party motion that wants to embed a feminist lens on to how we plan and operate the city.”

To this end, training has been paid for to teach Glasgow staff how to apply a feminist lens to their thinking. “It’s about applying that lens of ‘Is this safe?’”

Infrastructure is not the sole answer: Bruce points out that transport research showed that young women can’t use the free bus travel provided for those under 22, “because they’re actually scared of being on board a bus because of harassment”

At the time of the podcast recording, Bruce was hopeful that a new Misogyny Bill would be tabled to tackle harassment – the Bill would have created five new offences including stirring up hatred against women. But the bill was scrapped in May, with First Minister John Swinney claiming more time was needed to assess the implications of the recent Supreme Court judgement that defined a woman by biological sex for the purposes of equality legislation.

Scottish Labour justice spokesperson Pauline McNeill said "This is a shameful broken promise to Scottish women at a time when misogynistic hatred is on the rise.

The U-turn on the Misogyny Bill is a setback – but the work to build a feminist city carries on. “I managed to secure £500,000 in last year’s budget and £500,000 in this year’s budget – so that’s £1m in total for a feminist action fund and the projects I’m talking about: Public toilets, lighting.”

“It’s obviously not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a start,” says Bruce. “I’m hoping that [money] can come every year until we see a feminist city in Glasgow.”