Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World

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An indicator that speaks volumes about urban space and dynamics of power is the possibility to walk alone in the street. and includes stories about Toronto, Kigali, Hanoi, and Delhi); believe in women's friendships, urban spaces, and an equitable future for our cities.

One of the points I found most interesting was about how white women's comfort has been used to marginalise and increase danger for people of colour and homeless people; as areas are gentrified, this pushes out the homeless and people of colour who are then vilified in these spaces. My very first realisation about how gendered inequities are built into urban landscapes came with a strong urge to pee–and no public restrooms for women in sight. She maps the city from new vantage points, laying out a feminist intersectional approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future. She frequently references Black and Indigenous scholars (such as fellow geographers Katherine McKittrick and Sarah Hunt, and Indigenous scholar Kim Tallbear).I appreciate that the author was willing to point out that solutions weren’t always perfect and didn’t take a dogmatic approach to her position. She gives due space to the dynamic geographies of fear and how these fears have material outcomes for our lives, while also challenging the undue nostalgia with which most people view urban life of the decades past: "James Baldwin wrote about the same neighborhood as Jane Jacobs, where as a queer Black man he was regularly harassed by the police and viewed as a dangerous outsider, rather than part of the delightful diversity of Jacobs's own version of Greenwich Village…we need to set aside the rose-coloured glasses and notice who is missing from that picture of idealized city life. Despite that, some fascinating insights about urban political geography, and the potentialities - as well as limits - of urban design in realising substantive equality. From the analysis of queer women’s spaces to racialised social movements, it adds scholarly value to the literature not only on urban feminist geography, but also urban planning and policy as well as the social sciences more broadly. Nevertheless, Feminist City has the merit of initiating questions about what equality means for cities, using a gender perspective to open up a wider, intersectional discourse.

Combined with the author’s engaging content on popular culture through references to movies, television series and books, this makes Feminist City enjoyable and accessible to a more general audience.

Ogni città e ogni spazio pubblico riflette, in maniera più o meno implicita, la volontà di mantenere uno status di subordinazione e oppressione che colpisce in misure differenti gli individui marginalizzati.