Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World

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Kern [wants] to envi­sion a more inclu­sive city that con­sid­ers the phys­i­cal and cul­tur­al needs of its most mar­gin­al­ized mem­bers. Apoorva Tadepalli, In These Times Third, the feminist city is messy and it is alive! It demands a new engagement with its materialities and ecologies. This requires rethinking the relationship with materials and how we care for them. Care is however not a neutral term, not something that can be dispensed at will and that depends on complex material histories. In cities, those histories of care may have allowed for the sedimentation of inequalities and structures of oppression in complex material arrangements of infrastructures and patterns of resource use. A feminist city would put such arrangements into question. LK: I was partly inspired to include that section by other feminist writing about friendships: in Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist and in Erin Wunker’s book Notes from a Feminist Killjoy. First of all, thinking about girls’ urban interventions is a very, very tiny subfield of urban geography. We don’t tend to think of girls as making urban space or being active participants in urban space in the same way that we can more easily imagine boys’ and male youths’ activity in urban space. Sometimes we imagine it quite problematically, but at least we can imagine it, right? So I wanted to talk about the ways that girls, especially through their friendships, find space in the city. Feminist geographers, planners, and anti-violence workers have made substantial, if incomplete, progress toward creating safer, less fearful, cities, from pushing for simple changes to urban architectural features like lighting and walkways, to advocating for an overhaul of the entire field of urban planning.

Fast forward to today: Efforts to control women’s bodies to advance certain kinds of city improvement agendas are far from over. In very recent history, we’ve seen the forced or coerced sterilization of women of color and Indigenous women who receive social assistance or are seen as dependent on the state in some way. And this does not just stop with gender. According to Sauer, there has also been a lot of activism and political support for the LGBTQ community. Urban spaces can be embedded with certain values, influencing how inclusive it is to the community it serves.The feminist city, if it exists at all, is not a destination but a motivation: it is a commitment to a revisable, adaptable city that works for everyone, especially for those who are oppressed and excluded.

KERN: Sure, some people hear the term "feminism" and think that that is about elevating women over men, for example, but it's not about that at all. It's about embracing a set of principles, as I said earlier, around equity, justice, sustainability, and care that are about providing something better for everyone. Well, our government here in Canada, just like yours in the U.S., now has started to recognize that there can be no real economic recovery without some attention to these gender issues. So we've had renewed conversations about the possibility of a national childcare plan, which is something that comes up over and over again but very little action has been taken towards it. Walk through the Reumannplatz, one of the best-known squares in Austria's capital city, Vienna, and you will probably spot an outdoor platform, prominently labelled Mädchenbühne (girls' stage). The large podium, which can be used by everyone, was requested as a performance space by the girls of the nearby school when asked what they would like from the urban area.

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Cities aren't built to accommodate female bodies, female needs, female desires. In this rich, engaging book the feminist geographer Leslie Kern envisions how we might transform the “city of men” into a city for everyone. Let’s all move there immediately.' Lauren Elkin, author of Flaneuse Lauren Elkin, author of Flaneuse Adopting gender mainstreaming into planning is integrating the perspective into every stage of policy processes – design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation – to promote equality. Many travellers will think of Vienna, which is known for its formal balls, as a very traditional society, but the professor says that multiple factors have resulted in the capital being ahead of the gender equality curve in Central and Western Europe. Sauer explains that already in the 1970s, the city was home to many active women's groups and that Vienna has a history of having Social Democratic governments that invested in creating social equality.