40 Women Who Shaped Cities

At CityLab, we’ve spilled a lot of digital ink celebrating women whose work has shaped daily life in cities. We’ve penned odes to Jane Jacobs’s enduring legacy, considered Zaha Hadid’s starchitect turn, and unearthed the stories of women cartographers, who charted a course through a male-dominated terrain. Now, a new book for young readers looks at 40 other women—past and present—who have left an indelible mark on buildings, culture, and politics in cities across the globe.

Rad Women Worldwide (Ten Speed Press, $15.99) throws it way back to Hatshepsut, born in 1508 BCE. The ancient Egyptian ruler anointed herself Pharaoh and worked to broker peaceful relationships with neighboring countries. She took pains to mark her passage, peppering temples with statues of herself and leaving detailed chronicles in carvings. “Perhaps she worried that future generations wouldn’t believe a woman could rule as she had, or that someone might try to erase her legacy,” writes the book’s author, Kate Schatz.