CityReads | A Feminist City is Actually a Better City for All

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A Feminist City is Actually a Better City for All

The condition of women became the touchstone for judgments on city life.

Leslie Kern,2020. Feminist city: claiming space in a man-made world, Verso.

Sources: 

https://www.versobooks.com/books/3227-feminist-city

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2020/07/14/book-review-feminist-city-claiming-space-in-the-man-made-world-by-leslie-kern/

https://www.kqed.org/arts/13885402/unsurprisingly-a-feminist-city-is-actually-a-better-city-for-all

https://www.ft.com/content/406d5748-564c-48da-ab8e-55578b93def6

In a world where everything from medication to crash test dummies, bullet-proof vests to kitchen counters, smartphones to office temperatures, are designed, tested, and set to standards determined by men’s bodies and needs, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that cities are also designed with men’s lives as the basis for the blueprint. What sometimes seems less obvious is the inverse: that once built, our cities continue to shape and influence us.

Thus we live in the city of men. Our public spaces are not designed for female bodies. There is little consideration for women as mothers, workers or carers. Urban planning is dominated by men and their legacy. Every city in the world was designed and built by men. All forms of urban planning draw on a cluster of assumptions about the “typical” urban citizen: a breadwinning husband and father, able-bodied, heterosexual, white, and cis-gender.

Historically, urban spaces have been the centers of uneven power relations, oppressive socio-political structures and exclusionary and discriminatory practices. Despite some progress, women, disabled people, people of color, gender and sexual minorities, immigrants as well as Indigenous communities are still being marginalized and excluded from decision- and policymaking processes. In turn, cities become the major spheres of inequality and oppression that further shape the ways in which these groups experience public and private life.

In Feminist City: Claiming Space in the Man-Made World, urban feminist geographer Leslie Kern delves into these inequalities and systems of oppression that take concrete shape in cities. Starting from an analysis of gendered aspects of the urban space, Kern aims to bring ‘women’s questions’ into the discussion by combining her own biographical experience, feminist urban scholarship and popular culture. Throughout five major chapters, Kern comprehensively utilizes an intersectional feminist intervention to examine a wide-ranging of social inequalities exacerbated by one-size-fits-all urban planning.

This book takes on women’s questions about the city, looking at the good and the bad, the fun and the frightening, in order to shake up what we think we know about the cities around us. To see the social relations of the city—across gender, race, sexuality, ability, and more—with fresh eyes.

What city means for women: freedom and fear

Women still experience the city through a set of barriers–physical, social, economic, and symbolic–that shape their daily lives in ways that are deeply (although not only) gendered. Many of these barriers are invisible to men, because their own set of experiences means they rarely encounter them. This means that the primary decision-makers in cities, who are still mostly men, are making choices about everything from urban economic policy to housing design, school placement to bus seating, policing to snow removal with no knowledge, let alone concern for, how these decisions affect women. The city has been set up to support and facilitate the traditional gender roles of men and with men’s experiences as the “norm,” with little regard for how the city throws up roadblocks for women and ignores their day-to-day experience of city life.

In everyday life, the statements “the city is not for women” and “a woman’s place is in the city” are both true. The city is the place where women had choices open up for them that were unheard of in small towns and rural communities. Opportunities for work. Breaking free of parochial gender norms. Avoiding heterosexual marriage and motherhood. Pursuing non-traditional careers and public office. Expressing unique identities. Taking up social and political causes. Developing new kinship networks and foregrounding friendship. Participating in arts, culture, and media. All of these options are so much more available to women in cities.

Less tangible, but no less important, are the psychic qualities of the city: anonymity, energy, spontaneity, unpredictability, and yes, even danger. The urban streets often are a place of threats rather than community. Women are much more likely to suffer from the structure of the city than their male counterparts. The constant, low-grade threat of violence mixed with daily harassment shapes women’s urban lives in countless ways. Just as workplace harassment chases women out of positions of power and erases their contributions to science, politics, art, and culture, the specter of urban violence limits women’s choices, power, and economic opportunities. Fear of crime has not kept women from cities. However, it’s one of many factors that shape women’s urban lives in particular ways. The condition of women became the touchstone for judgments on city life.

As feminist geographer Jane Darke says: “Any settlement is an inscription in space of the social relations in the society that built it…. Our cities are patriarchy written in stone, brick, glass and concrete.” Patriarchy written in stone. Once built, our cities continue to shape and influence social relations, power, inequality, and so on. Their form helps shape the range of possibilities for individuals and groups. Their form helps keep some things seeming normal and right, and others “out of place” and wrong. In short, physical places like cities matter when we want to think about social change.

A Feminist City is Actually a Better City for All

During the Pandemic, it’s worth it, as we rebuild our urban centers with an eye towards safety, to rethink who these places are designed for. What would a city look like if it was built with the everyday life of a single mother in mind? A minimum-wage worker? A disabled person? If we want our cities to change for the better, we need to start from someplace different. What counts as feminist policy or infrastructure is often something that would improve the urban landscape for all types of people.

A feminist city must be one where barriers—physical and social—are dismantled, where all bodies are welcome and accommodated. A feminist city must be care-centred, not because women should remain largely responsible for care work, but because the city has the potential to spread care work more evenly. A feminist city must look to the creative tools that women have always used to support one another and find ways to build that support into the very fabric of the urban world.

What can cities do differently to support women’s independence, equality, and empowerment? Safe and affordable public transit and housing, eliminating the gendered and racialized wage gap, and universal child care would be great places to start. But female-led design hopes to go further than this — creating cities that serve everyone, irrelevant of gender, age, disabilities, sexuality or ethnicity. Because women know what it is like to be excluded by cities’ designs, they approach urban planning with this wholesale, more inclusive approach. It is about creating a physical environment that is not designed around the fully grown, able-bodied male subject.

The feminist city is an ongoing experiment in living differently, living better, and living more justly in an urban world. We all have the capacity to make new urban worlds—feminist urban worlds—even if those worlds only last a moment, or only exist in one little pocket of the city.

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