"They know the place. We don't know the place." Girls hold deep urban knowledge, and meaningful change begins by listening to them.

Gender violence intersects with race, age, class, and historical marginalisation - which is why gender-sensitive planning in the Global South cannot be optional.

Girls in South Africa grow up absorbing survival strategies - don't walk alone, don't walk at night, don't wear certain clothes. These lessons are not taught formally. They are absorbed through fear, stories, and lived experience.

"It's not just a brainstorm." Joke Quintens of Wetopia explained that in their Girls Make the City project, work with girls runs at least four workshops, goes deep into understanding a place with the girls, and uses a whole system approach - involving policy makers, schools, families, neighbours - that always ends in concrete action.

Across five locations in three cities - Brussels, Ostend, and Cape Town - girls said the same thing: "public space also belongs to us." From reclaiming skate parks on Saturdays to programming a music kiosk after dark in Ostend, their ambition goes beyond access.

Beyond simply using space, girls wanted to reshape what these places mean - through a female lens, through cultural significance, through the strengths and care associated with motherhood. Girls want to expand and enrich the identities of public spaces.

A girl in Brussels put it bluntly: "Here are toilets for boys and even for dogs, but not for us." Toilets, better lighting, welcoming surfaces to sit on - friendly infrastructure shapes how girls feel about their right to be in public space. 

This only emerged in South Africa. In both Langa and Athlone, girls said they need confidence - to walk, to speak, to take up space - before participation, before leadership, before visibility. In the Global South, confidence is not individual. It is shaped by who is allowed to be visible, who feels protected, who is believed.

Female park ambassadors, women maintaining infrastructure, redefining what public work looks like. These roles make women not just participants in public space, but leaders of it.

The girls themselves said it: "We have to educate our brothers, we have to educate men." They proposed creative messaging tools, safety campaigns, and direct communication with boys and men - not to confront, but to help men understand the impact of their behaviour and promote mutual respect.

Walls honouring female icons in Langa, playful gossip benches in Ostend, girl-powered radio and a food memory garden with grandmothers in Athlone. All of these became tools of belonging.

In Brussels, the project deliberately created a "new us": skate girls, girls from social housing, girls from a youth organisation, girls from a privileged school nearby - all sharing the same neighbourhood but living in completely different universes. Bringing them together was the first step.

Langa and Athlone were deliberately separated by apartheid planning along racial, economic, and social lines, and those separations are still felt today. What the project revealed was a sisterhood across these divided spaces - not one that ignores difference, but one that recognises shared vulnerability, shared fear, and shared hope.

“What's good for girls is good for all" - this applies to older people, LGBT community, people with disabilities. And as one speaker closed: "If a girl can walk freely in Langa or Athlone without watching her back, then we are closer to a just city for all than anything else."