CityReads│12 Great Books about Women and the City

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12 Great Books about Women and the City

City designers should be thinking more about the female perspective.

If city has a gender, it is male. For a very long time, urban planning, construction and development have ignored women's need and involvement. For a Balance-For-Better city, urban researchers and practitioners should be thinking more about the female perspective. Today is the International Women's Day, I put together a list of 12 great books about women and the city. You are welcome to recommend books that should be included but are missed here.

1 A Women's Berlin: Building the Modern City by Despina Stratigakos, University Of Minnesota Press, 2008

The modern city is the birthplace of the modern woman. Around the beginning of the twentieth century, women began to claim Berlin as their own, expressing a vision of the capital that embraced their feminine modernity, both culturally and architecturally. Women located their lives and made their presence felt in the streets and institutions of this dynamic metropolis. From residences to restaurants, schools to exhibition halls, a visible network of women's spaces arose to accommodate changing patterns of life and work.

A Women's Berlin retraces this largely forgotten city, which came into being in the years between German unification in 1871 and the demise of the monarchy in 1918 and laid the foundation for a novel experience of urban modernity. Although the phenomenon of women taking control of urban space was widespread in this period, Despina Stratigakos shows how Berlin's concentration of women's building projects produced a more fully realized vision of an alternative metropolis. Female clients called on female design professionals to help them define and articulate their architectural needs. Many of the projects analyzed in A Women's Berlin represent a collaborative effort uniting female patrons, architects, and designers to explore the nature of female aesthetics and spaces.

At the same time that women were transforming the built environment, they were remaking Berlin in words and images. Female journalists, artists, political activists, and social reformers portrayed women as influential actors on the urban scene and encouraged female audiences to view their relationship to the city in a radically different light. Stratigakos reveals how women's remapping of Berlin connected the imaginary to the physical, merged dreams and asphalt, and inextricably linked the creation of the modern woman with that of the modern city.

2 Cities and Gender by Helen Jarvis, Routledge, 2009

Men and women experience the city differently: in relation to housing assets, use of transport, relative mobility, spheres of employment and a host of domestic and caring responsibilities. An analysis of urban and gender studies, as co-constitutive subjects, is long overdue.

Cities and Gender is a systematic treatment of urban and gender studies combined. It presents both a feminist critique of mainstream urban policy and planning and a gendered reorientation of key urban social, environmental and city-regional debates. It looks behind the ‘headlines' on issues of transport, housing, uneven development, regeneration and social exclusion, for instance, to account for the ‘hidden' infrastructure of everyday life. The three main sections on ‘Approaching the City', ‘Gender and Built Environment' and, finally, ‘Representation and Regulation' explore not only the changing environments, working practices and household structures evident in European and North American cities today, but also those of the global south. International case studies alert the reader to stark contrasts in gendered life-chances (differences between north and south as well as inequalities and diversity within these regions) while at the same time highlighting interdependencies which globally thread through the lives of women and men as the result of uneven development.

This book introduces the reader to previously neglected dimensions of gendered critical urban analysis. It sheds light, through competing theories and alternative explanations, on recent transformations of gender roles, state and personal politics and power relations; across intersecting spheres: of home, work, the family, urban settlements and civil society. It takes a household perspective alongside close scrutiny of social networks, gender contracts, welfare regimes and local cultural milieu. In addition to providing the student with a solid conceptual grounding across broad structures of production, consumption and social reproduction the argument cultivates an interdisciplinary awareness of, and dialogue between, the everyday issues of urban dwellers in affluent and developing world cities. The format of the book means that included with each chapter are key definitions, ‘boxed' concepts and case study evidence along with specifically tailored learning activities and further reading. This is both a timely and trenchant discussion that has pertinence for students, scholars and researchers.

3 Constructing the Patriarchal City: Gender and the Built Environments of London, Dublin, Toronto, and Chicago, 1870s into the 1940s by Maureen A. Flanagan, Temple University Press, 2018

In the Anglo-Atlantic world of the late nineteenth century, groups of urban residents struggled to reconstruct their cities in the wake of industrialization and to create the modern city. New professional men wanted an orderly city that functioned for economic development. Women's vision challenged the men's right to reconstruct the city and resisted the prevailing male idea that women in public caused the city's disorder.

Constructing the Patriarchal City compares the ideas and activities of men and women in four English-speaking cities that shared similar ideological, professional, and political contexts. Historian Maureen Flanagan investigates how ideas about gender shaped the patriarchal city as men used their expertise in architecture, engineering, and planning to fashion a built environment for male economic enterprise and to confine women in the private home. Women consistently challenged men to produce a more equitable social infrastructure that included housing that would keep people inside the city, public toilets for women as well as men, housing for single, working women, and public spaces that were open and safe for all residents.

4 Gender and Planning: A Reader by Susan S. Fainstein and Lisa J. Servon, Rutgers University Press, 2005

"'A woman's place is in the home' has been one of the most important principles of architectural design and urban planning in the United States for the last century." So wrote Dolores Hayden in her 1981 essay, "What Would a Nonsexist City Be Like?", a chapter in Gender and Planning: A Reader. The book assembles a collection of provocative essays written on gender and planning over the past 30 years, adding an original introduction that concisely outlines an area of planning discourse not often taught in traditional schools. Indeed, the reader is intended for an academic setting -- according to co-editors Susan Fainstein and Lisa Servon, planning professors at Columbia and New School University, respectively, it's the book "we wished we had when we taught gender-focused courses." Although at times quite dense and theoretical, especially in the Planning Theory section, many of the chapters are accessible to a wider audience. Specifically, Gender and Planning could be useful to professionals who may have missed gender-related topics in their own planning education, and it includes thoughtful dialogue on the history of feminism, planning, housing movements, and architecture and design.

To the editors, gender is not just about women; it's about societal roles and relationships, and how different groups -- including men, women, and gays, for example -- have varying levels of power and access to resources over time. This temporal, dynamic way of thinking about gender can help planners question their standard practices by acknowledging that cities are not designed simply for humans universally, but for a highly diverse group in terms of race, ethnicity, and class, in addition to gender. How would our lives be improved if planners took gender into account? "People would feel safer on the streets. Homes would function better for families and in relation to communities. Access to services would be improved. All individuals would be entitled to realize their capabilities." With chapters covering public and private space, housing, economic development, and transportation, and topics ranging from microenterprise programs to public transit to sexuality, Gender and Planning may be an eye-opening read for many of today's planners.

5 Gender in the Post-Fordist Urban：The Gender Revolution in Planning and Public Policy by Marguerite van den Berg, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

This book investigates the gender revolution in urban planning and public policy. Building on feminist urban studies, it introduces the concept of genderfication as a means of understanding the consequences of post-Fordist gender notions for the city. It traces the changes in western urban gender relations, arguing that in the post-Fordist urban landscape gender is used for urban planning and public policy – both to rebrand a city's image and to produce space for gender-equal ideals, often at the cost of precarious urban populations.

This is a topic that remains largely unexplored in critical urban studies and radical geography. Chapters cover how Jane Jacobs' perspectives provide an alternative to the patriarchal modernist city for contemporary planners and using Rotterdam as a case study Van Den Berg discusses why new urban planning methods focus on attracting women and children as new urbanites. Topics include: forms of place marketing, gender as a repertoire for contemporary urban Imagineering and the concept of urban re-generation. The final chapter investigates how cities aiming to redefine themselves imagine future populations and how they design social policies that explicitly and particularly target women as mothers. Scholars in all fields of urban studies will find this work thought-provoking, instructive and informative.

6 How Women Saved the City by Daphne Spain, University Of Minnesota Press, 2002

In the days between the Civil War and World War I, women rarely worked outside the home, rarely went to college, and, if our histories are to be believed, rarely put their mark on the urban spaces unfolding around them. And yet, as this book clearly demonstrates, women did play a key role in shaping the American urban landscape.

To uncover the contribution of women to urban development during this period, Daphne Spain looks at the places where women participated most actively in public life—voluntary organizations like the Young Women's Christian Association, the Salvation Army, the College Settlements Association, and the National Association of Colored Women. In the extensive building projects of these associations—boarding houses, vocational schools, settlement houses, public baths, and playgrounds—she finds clear evidence of a built environment created by women.

Exploring this environment, Spain reconstructs the story of the "redemptive places" that addressed the real needs of city dwellers—especially single women, African-Americans, immigrants, and the poor—and established an environment in which newcomers could learn to become urban Americans. 

7 Spaces of Their Own：Women's Public Sphere in Transnational China by Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, University Of Minnesota Press, 1998

How are the public and political lives of Chinese women constrained by states and economies? And how have pockets of women's consciousness come to be produced in and disseminated from this traditionally masculine milieu? The essays in this volume examine the possibilities for a public sphere for Chinese women, one that would emerge from concrete historical situations and local contexts and also cut across the political boundaries separating the Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the West.

The challenges of this project are taken up in essays on the legacy of state feminism on the Mainland as contrasted with a grassroots women's movement in Taiwan; on the role of the capitalist consumer economy in the emerging lesbian movement in Taiwan; and on the increased trafficking of women as brides, prostitutes, and mistresses between the Mainland and wealthy male patrons in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

The writers' examples of masculine domination in the media include the reformulation of Chinese women in Fifth Generation films for a transnational Western male film audience and the portrayal of Mainland women in Taiwanese and Hong Kong media. The contributors also consider male nationalism as it is revealed through both international sports coverage on television and in a Chinese television drama. Other works examine a women's museum, a telephone hotline in Beijing, the films of Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui, the transnational contacts of a Taiwanese feminist organization, the diaspora of Mainland women writers, and the differences between Chinese and Western feminist themes.

8 Unfolding the City：Women Write the City in Latin America, Anne Lambright and Elisabeth Guerrero, University Of Minnesota Press, 2006

An original look at how Latin American women writers rethink urban space. The city is not only built of towers of steel and glass; it is a product of culture. It plays an especially important role in Latin America, where urban areas hold a near-monopoly on resources and are home to an expanding population.

The essays in this collection assert that women's views of the city are unique and revealing. For the first time, Unfolding the City addresses issues of gender and the urban in literature—particularly lesser-known works of literature—written by Latin American women from Mexico City, Santiago, and Buenos Aires. The contributors propose new mappings of urban space; interpret race and class dynamics; and describe Latin American urban centers in the context of globalization.

9 Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940 by Sarah Deutsch, Oxford University Press, 2002

A penetrating analysis of how women shaped public and private space in Boston - and how space shaped women's lives in turn - during a period of dramatic change in American cities.

In the 70 years between the Civil War and World War II, the women of Boston changed the city dramatically. From anti-spitting campaigns and demands for police mothers to patrol local parks, to calls for a decent wage and living quarters, women rich and poor, white and black, immigrant and native-born struggled to make a place for themselves in the city. Now, in Women and the City historian Sarah Deutsch tells this story for the first time, revealing how they changed not only the manners but also the physical layout of the modern city.

Deutsch shows how the women of Boston turned the city from a place with no respectable public space for women, to a city where women sat on the City Council and met their beaux on the street corners. The book follows the efforts of working-class, middle-class, and elite matrons, working girls and "new women" as they struggled to shape the city in their own interests. And in fact they succeeded in breathtaking fashion, rearranging and redefining the moral geography of the city, and in so doing broadening the scope of their own opportunities. But Deutsch reveals that not all women shared equally in this new access to public space, and even those who did walk the streets with relative impunity and protested their wrongs in public, did so only through strategic and limited alliances with other women and with men.

10 Women and the Everyday City：Public Space in San Francisco, 1890–1915, by Jessica Ellen Sewell, University Of Minnesota Press, 2010

Women and the Everyday City explores the lives of women in turn-of-the-century San Francisco. A period of transformation of both gender roles and American cities, she shows how changes in the city affected women's ability to negotiate shifting gender norms as well as how women's increasing use of the city played a critical role in the campaign for women's suffrage. Working at the nexus of urban history, architectural history, and cultural geography, Jessica Ellen Sewell offers a revealing portrait of both a major American city during its early years and the women who shaped it—and the country—for generations to come.

Focusing on women's everyday use of streetcars, shops, restaurants, and theaters, Sewell reveals the impact of women on these public places—what women did there, which women went there, and how these places were changed in response to women's presence. Using the diaries of three women in San Francisco (Annie Haskell, Ella Lees Leigh, and Mary Eugenia Pierce, who wrote extensively about their everyday experiences), Sewell studies their accounts of day trips to the city and combines them with memoirs, newspapers, maps, photographs, and her own observations of the buildings that exist today to build a sense of life in San Francisco at this pivotal point in history.

11 Women in Cities：Gender and the Urban Environment by Jo Little, Linda Peake and Pat Richardson, Macmillan, 1988

This book is part of the rapidly growing body of work in feminist geography attempting to understand "the interrelations between socially constructed gender relations and socially constructed environments" (p. 2). Like other branches of women's studies, feminist geography incorporates theories from a number of disciplines;  its unique contribution is analysis of the spatial distribution of gender-based activities.

Women in Cities clearly reflects the main themes of feminist geography in its concern with the separation of home and work, the increase of married women in the paid labor force, and women's different experiences as influenced by social class, ethnicity, marital status, parenthood, and position in the life cycle.

The editors have attempted to bring both theory and data to bear on the question of how women and men differentially influence and are influenced by the urban environment. Their statement of the book's goal is "to illustrate that an understanding of the nature of women's oppression is greatly enhanced by examining lives and activity patterns - that is, their active use of space and time - affect, and are affected by, spatial structure and environmental change" .

Comprising six articles on the theme of gender and the contemporary city, this work presents material on women's urban experiences, examining the relation between gender and the changing organization of the urban environment. It also illustrates the constraints women encounter in their lives. Different chapters examine such issues as the problems women encounter because of the spatial separation of different functions of the city, constraints on women's paid work and leisure activities due to their household role, and the blurring of the "public" and "private" sphere.

12 Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London by Lauren Elkin, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017

The flâneur is the quintessentially masculine figure of privilege and leisure who strides the capitals of the world with abandon. But it is the flâneuse who captures the imagination of the cultural critic Lauren Elkin. In her wonderfully gender-bending new book, the flâneuse is a “determined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.” Virginia Woolf called it “street haunting”; Holly Golightly epitomized it in Breakfast at Tiffany's; and Patti Smith did it in her own inimitable style in 1970s New York.

Part cultural meander, part memoir, Flâneuse takes us on a distinctly cosmopolitan jaunt that begins in New York, where Elkin grew up, and transports us to Paris via Venice, Tokyo, and London, all cities in which she's lived. We are shown the paths beaten by such flâneuses as the cross-dressing nineteenth-century novelist George Sand, the Parisian artist Sophie Calle, the wartime correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and the writer Jean Rhys. With tenacity and insight, Elkin creates a mosaic of what urban settings have meant to women, charting through literature, art, history, and film the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes fraught relationship that women have with the metropolis.

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