Читать книгу Feminist City - Leslie Kern - Страница 8
ОглавлениеI have an old picture of my little brother and I surrounded by dozens of pigeons in London’s Trafalgar Square. I’m guessing from our matching bowl cuts and bell-bottom corduroys that it’s 1980 or 1981. We’re happily tossing out seeds that our parents purchased from a little vending machine in the square. You won’t find those machines anymore because feeding the pigeons is strictly frowned upon, but back then it was one of the best parts of our trip to visit my dad’s family. We were in the centre of everything, our excitement palpable. In our glowing faces I see the beginning of our mutual lifelong love of London and city life.
Josh and I came into the world via downtown Toronto, but our parents raised us in the suburbs. Although Mississauga’s population makes it one of the largest and most diverse cities in Canada, its essence in the 1980s was car-centred suburban mall-scape. My brother and I each moved to Toronto as soon as we could, rejecting suburbia faster than we could say “Yonge-University-Spadina Line.” But our experiences of city life have been vastly different. I doubt Josh has ever had to walk home with his keys sticking out from his fist or been shoved for taking up too much space with a baby stroller. Since we share the same skin colour, religion, ability, class background, and a good chunk of our DNA, I have to conclude that gender is the difference that matters.
Women have always been seen as a problem for the modern city. During the Industrial Revolution, European cities grew quickly and brought a chaotic mix of social classes and immigrants to the streets. The Victorian social norms of the time included strict boundaries between classes and a firm etiquette designed to protect the purity of high status white women. This etiquette was fractured by the increased urban contact between women and men, and between women and the city’s great seething masses. “The gentleman and, worse still, the gentlewoman were forced to rub shoulders with the lower orders and be buffeted and pushed with little ceremony or deference,” writes cultural historian Elizabeth Wilson.1 The “contested terrain” of Victorian London had opened space for women to “claim themselves as part of a public,” especially with respect to debates about safety and sexual violence, explains historian Judith Walkowitz.2 However, this chaotic transition time meant it was increasingly difficult to discern status and a lady on the streets was at risk of the ultimate insult: being mistaken for a “public woman.”
This threat to the supposedly natural distinctions of rank and the shakiness of barriers of respectability meant that for many commentators of the time, urban life itself was a threat to civilization. “The condition of women,” explains Wilson, “became the touchstone for judgments on city life.”3 Women’s gradually expanding freedoms were thus met with moral panic over everything from sex work to bicycles. The countryside along with the newly expanding suburbs would provide a suitable retreat for the middle and upper classes and most importantly, safety and continued respectability for women.
While some women needed to be protected from the city’s messy disorder, other women were in need of control, re-education, and perhaps even banishment. Growing attention to city life made the conditions of the working class more visible and increasingly unacceptable to the middle class. Who better to blame than women, who had come to cities to find work in factories and domestic service, thus turning the family “upside down,” according to Engels. Women’s participation in paid labour meant some small amount of independence and of course less time for domestic responsibilities within their own homes. Poor women were cast as domestic failures whose inability to keep clean homes was to blame for the “demoralization” of the working class. This demoralization expressed itself through vice and other kinds of problematic private and public behaviours. All of this was viewed as a deeply unnatural state of affairs.
Of course, the greatest social evil was that of prostitution, which had the potential to destroy the family, shake the foundations of society, and spread disease. In the pre-germ theory understanding of the time, disease was believed to be spread by an airborne miasma carried by noxious sewer odours. The concept of a moral miasma emerged as well: the idea that one could be infected by depravity via sheer proximity to those who carried it. Writers of the time were scandalized by the common presence of “streetwalkers” who openly plied their trade, tempting good men into a world of vice. Women were also “constantly exposed to temptation, and, once ‘fallen’, a woman was doomed, many reformers believed, to a life of increasing degradation and an early and tragic death.”4
The solution proposed by many, including Charles Dickens, was for fallen women to emigrate to the colonies where they might marry one of many surplus settler men and be restored to respectability. Out here, the need to protect white women settlers from the menace of the “native” provided one rationale for the containment and elimination of Indigenous populations from urbanizing areas. Popular novels of the day depicted sensational stories of kidnap, torture, rape, and forced marriage of white women by marauding, vengeful “savages.” These new fortified settler cities would mark the transition from frontier to civilization and the purity and safety of white women would complete the metamorphosis.
On the flip side, Indigenous women were seen as threats to this urban transformation. Their bodies carried the capacity to reproduce the “savagery” that colonizers sought to contain. They also held important positions of cultural, political, and economic power in their communities. Stripping Indigenous women of this power by imposing European patriarchal family and governance systems while simultaneously dehumanizing Indigenous women as primitive and promiscuous laid the groundwork for the legal and geographic processes of dispossession and displacement.5 Thus, the degradation and stigmatization of Indigenous women were part of the urbanization process. Given the extraordinary rates of violence against Indigenous women and girls today in settler colonial cities, it’s clear that these attitudes and practices have had lasting, devastating legacies.
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 colour and Indigenous women who receive social assistance or are seen as dependent on the state in some way. The racist stereotype of the Black “welfare queen” was circulated as part of the narrative of failing cities in the 1970s and 1980s. This has been connected to moral panics over teen pregnancy with their assumptions that teen moms will join the rolls of said welfare queens and produce criminally-disposed children. Contemporary movements to abolish sex work have been re-labelled as anti-trafficking campaigns with trafficking cast as a new form of sexualized urban threat. Unfortunately, sex workers who aren’t trafficked are accorded little respect or agency under this new agenda.6 Anti-obesity campaigns target women as individuals and as mothers, with their bodies and their children’s bodies viewed as symptoms of modern urban issues such as car dependency and fast food.
In short, women’s bodies are still often seen as the source or sign of urban problems. Even young white women having babies have been villainized as the culprits of gentrification, while proponents of gentrification blame single mothers of colour and immigrant women for reproducing urban criminality and slowing down urban “revitalization.” There seems to be no end to the ways in which women can be linked to urban social concerns.
While I concede that some of the more exaggerated Victorian’s fears about purity and cleanliness have lessened, 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. This is what I mean by the “city of men.”
In the midst of working on this book, I was uncharacteristically excited to receive my glossy University of Toronto alumni magazine because this time the cover story was The Cities We Need.7 The current president of U of T is an urban geographer, so I had high hopes. Inside were four articles about urban “needs:” afford-ability, accessibility, sustainability, and more fun. Great topics. But each article was written by a middle-aged white man. Most of the experts cited by the authors were men, including the ubiquitous Richard Florida, whose outsized influence on urban policy around the world through his (self-confessed) deeply-flawed creative class paradigm might in fact be to blame for many of the current affordability problems plaguing cities like Vancouver, Toronto, and San Francisco. I’d like to say I was surprised or disappointed, but resigned is probably the best word. As feminist scholar Sara Ahmed cleverly points out, “Citationality is another form of academic relationality. White men is reproduced as a citational relational. White men cite other white men: it is what they have always done … White men as a well-trodden path; the more we tread that way the more we go that way.”8 Urban scholarship and planning has been “going that way” for a good long while.
I’m far from the first feminist writer to point this out. There is, by now, a deep history of women writing about urban life (like Charlotte Brontë in Villette), women advocating for the needs of urban women (such as social reformers Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells), and women coming up with their own designs for homes, cities, and neighbourhoods (like Catharine Beecher and Melusina Fay Peirce). Feminist architects, urban planners, and geographers have made significant interventions in their fields through rigorous empirical research into gendered experiences. Activists have pushed hard for important changes to urban design, policing practices, and services to better meet women’s needs. And yet, a woman will still cross the street at night if a stranger is walking behind her.
The foundational work of feminist urban scholars and writers before me is the backbone of the book. When I first “discovered” feminist geography in graduate school, something clicked for me. Suddenly the theoretical insights of feminist theory took on a third dimension. I understood the operation of power in a new way and fresh insights about my own experiences as a woman living in the suburbs and then the city started to pile up. I never looked back and I’m proud to call myself a feminist geographer today. Throughout this book, we’ll meet the urban thinkers who have studied everything from how women travel through the city to the gendered symbolism of urban architecture to the role of women in gentrification. But rather than start with theory or policy or urban design, I want to begin from what poet Adrienne Rich calls “the geography closest in,” the body and everyday life.9
“Begin with the material,” writes Rich. “Begin with the female body. … Not to transcend this body, but to reclaim it.”10 What are we reclaiming here? We’re reclaiming personal, lived experience, gut knowledges, and hard-earned truths. Rich calls it “Trying as women to see from the center,” or, a politics of asking women’s questions.11 Not essentialist questions, based on some false claim to a biological definition of womanhood. Rather, questions that emerge from the everyday, embodied experience of those who include themselves in the dynamic and shifting category “women.” For us, city life generates questions that for too long have gone unanswered.
As a woman, my everyday urban experiences are deeply gendered. My gender identity shapes how I move through the city, how I live my life day-to-day, and the choices available to me. My gender is more than my body, but my body is the site of my lived experience, where my identity, history, and the spaces I’ve lived in meet and interact and write themselves on my flesh. This is the space that I write from. It’s the space where my experiences lead me to ask, “Why doesn’t my stroller fit on the streetcar?” “Why do I have to walk an extra half mile home because the shortcut is too dangerous?” “Who will pick up my kid from camp if I get arrested at a G20 protest?” These aren’t just personal questions. They start to get to the heart of why and how cities keep women “in their place.”
I started writing this book as the “Me Too” movement exploded.12 In the wake of investigative reporting that exposed long-time abusers and harassers in Hollywood, a wave of women and several men came forward to tell their stories about the scourge of sexual harassment and violence across workplaces, sports, politics, and education. Not since Anita Hill spoke out has the harm of sexual harassment generated such a level of media, institutional, and policy attention. While the rhetoric used to discredit survivors and whistleblowers has not changed much since the Clarence Thomas hearings, the (almost literal!) mountains of evidence against the worst culprits and most misogynist institutions are convincing many that something must change.13
Survivors of this abuse have testified to the long term, life-altering effects of continually facing physical and psychological violence. Their stories resonate with the vast literature on women’s fear in cities. The constant, low-grade threat of violence mixed with daily harassment shapes women’s urban lives in countless conscious and unconscious ways. Just as workplace harassment chases women out of positions of power and erases their contributions to science, politics, art, and culture, the spectre of urban violence limits women’s choices, power, and economic opportunities. Just as industry norms are structured to permit harassment, protect abusers, and punish victims, urban environments are structured to support patriarchal family forms, gender-segregated labour markets, and traditional gender roles. And even though we like to believe society has evolved beyond the strict confines of things like gender roles, women and other marginalized groups continue to find their lives limited by the kinds of social norms that have been built into our cities.
“Me Too” survivors’ stories expose the continued prevalence of what feminist activists call “rape myths:” a set of false ideas and misconceptions that sustain sexual harassment and violence in part by shifting the blame to victims. Rape myths are a key component of what we now call “rape culture.” “What were you wearing?” and “why didn’t you report it?” are two classic rape myth questions that “Me Too” survivors face. Rape myths also have a geography. This gets embedded into the mental map of safety and danger that every woman carries in her mind. “What were you doing in that neighbourhood? At that bar? Waiting alone for a bus?” “Why were you walking alone at night?” “Why did you take a shortcut?” We anticipate these questions and they shape our mental maps as much as any actual threat. These sexist myths serve to remind us that we’re expected to limit our freedom to walk, work, have fun, and take up space in the city. They say: The city isn’t really for you.
A decade or so after starting that pigeon feeding frenzy, Josh and I were back in London, old enough now to take the Tube to Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street by ourselves. Our parents probably just wanted to enjoy some kind of culturally-uplifting experience without being asked when we were going shopping every five minutes. Like the pigeons you’ll now find smartly navigating the Tube to their new favourite food sources, we taught ourselves to think and feel our way through the city on our own. Long before smartphones, we just had the Tube map and our instincts to guide us. We never felt afraid. The signs and announcements about safety and vigilance conjured distant news clips of IRA bombings, but this was nothing that could touch a couple of Canadian kids on vacation. By the end of the trip, we were (in our own minds) savvy little urban explorers only a step or two removed from being real Londoners.
About a year before that trip we went to New York City for the first time. This would have been 1990, a few years before Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s “zero tolerance” policies accelerated the Disney-esque makeover of Times Square and other iconic neighbourhoods. We had a little freedom to roam the big shops of Fifth Avenue together, but there was no possibility of hopping on the subway alone here. In fact, I don’t think we took the subway once the whole trip, even with our parents. New York was a completely different beast than Toronto or London. For our parents, the excitement of this city was laced with a palpable sense of threat that seemed much more real than an IRA attack.
I think I learned then that a city—its dangers, thrills, culture, attraction, and more—resides in the imagination as well as in its material form. The imagined city is shaped by experience, media, art, rumour, and our own desires and fears. The gritty, dangerous New York of the 1970s and 1980s held sway in our parents’ minds. It wasn’t what we experienced in 1990 but it shaped what we knew or thought we knew about the place. And in fact, that hint of danger was alluring. It made New York New York: not Toronto, not London, and certainly not Mississauga. The energy and pull of the city was tangled up with the sense that anything might happen.
This tangled up sense of excitement and danger, freedom and fear, opportunity and threat, contours so much feminist thinking and writing about cities. As early as the 1980s, my own future PhD supervisor boldly claimed “a woman’s place is in the city.”14 Gerda Wekerle was arguing that only dense, service-rich urban environments could support women’s “double days” of paid and unpaid work. At the same time, sociologists and criminologists were raising the alarm over women’s extremely high fear of urban crime, fear which couldn’t be explained by actual levels of stranger violence against women.15 For feminist activists, acts of public violence against women sparked the first Take Back the Night demonstrations in cities across Europe and North America as early as the mid-1970s.
In everyday life, the statements “the city is not for women” and “a woman’s place is in the city” are both true. As Elizabeth Wilson attests, women have long flocked to city life despite its hostilities. She suggests that “there has perhaps been an overemphasis on the confinement of Victorian womanhood to the private sphere,” noting that even in this era of strict gender norms, some women were able to explore the city and take on new roles as public figures.16 Dangers be damned. 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. In Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, heroine Lucy Snowe travels alone to London and as she dares “the perils of crossings” she experiences “perhaps an irrational, but a real pleasure.”17 I’m not trying to say that women like being fearful, but that some of the pleasure of city life relies on its inherent unknowability and on one’s courage in braving that unknowability. In fact, unpredictability and disorder can come to represent the “authentically urban” to women who reject safe suburban conformity and repetitive rural rhythms.18 Of course, finding urban disorder exciting is a little easier if you have the means to retreat when you want to. In any case, 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.
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. To spark discussion about other, less visible kinds of urban experiences. To open space for thinking creatively about what might generate a feminist city. To bring feminist geography into conversation with the everyday nitty gritty of trying to survive and thrive, struggle and succeed, in the city.
I was on my way to one of the big annual geography conferences in Chicago in 2004 when I read that long-time anti-feminist Globe & Mail columnist Margaret Wente had also “discovered” feminist geography.19 Since hating men and knowing your national capitals are clearly two totally different fields, who could believe that feminist geography was a legitimate subject? Wente used her incredulity to illustrate to her followers her regularly-recycled claim that the humanities and social sciences were worthless enterprises full of made-up disciplines and fake academics.
What the willfully ignorant Wente had no desire to understand was that geography adds a fascinating dimension to feminist analysis. Of course, you have to be willing to get beyond your middle school perception of geography: it’s not about colouring in maps or memorizing continents. Geography is about the human relationship to our environment, both human-built and natural. A geographic perspective on gender offers a way of understanding how sexism functions on the ground. Women’s second-class status is enforced not just through the metaphorical notion of “separate spheres,” but through an actual, material geography of exclusion. Male power and privilege are upheld by keeping women’s movements limited and their ability to access different spaces constrained. As feminist geographer Jane Darke says in one of my favourite quotes: “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.”20
Patriarchy written in stone. This simple statement of the fact that built environments reflect the societies that construct them might seem obvious. 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, this shouldn’t come as a surprise.21 The director of urban design for Toronto, Lorna Day, recently found that the city’s guidelines for wind effects assumed a “standard person” whose height, weight, and surface area corresponded to an adult male.22 You’d never think that gender bias influences the height and position of skyscrapers or the development of a wind tunnel, but there you have it.
What sometimes seems even less obvious is the inverse: that once built, our cities continue to shape and influence social relations, power, inequality, and so on. Stone, brick, glass, and concrete don’t have agency, do they? They aren’t consciously trying to uphold the patriarchy, are they? No, but 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.
The gendered symbolism of the urban built environment is one reminder of who built the city. Feminist architect Dolores Hayden’s explosively titled 1977 article “Skyscraper Seduction, Skyscraper Rape” rips into the male power and procreative fantasies embodied by the development of ever-taller urban structures. Echoing the usual male monuments to military might, the skyscraper is a monument to male corporate economic power. Hayden argues that the office tower is one more addition “to the procession of phallic monuments in history—including poles, obelisks, spires, columns and watchtowers,” as architects used the language of base, shaft, and tip and rendered upward-thrusting buildings ejaculating light into the night sky via spotlights.23 The phallic fantasy of the skyscraper, suggests Hayden, hides the reality of the violence of capitalism, made manifest in the deaths of construction workers, bankruptcies, and the hazards of fire, terrorism, and structural collapse. As feminist geographer Liz Bondi puts it, it’s not really about the symbolism of the phallus so much as its verticality is an icon of power via the “masculine character of capital.”24
The language of architecture draws on the idea that gender is a binary opposition, with different forms and features described as masculine or feminine. Bondi suggests that these codings of the built environment “interpret gender difference as ‘natural’ and thereby universalize and legitimize a particular version of gender differentiation.”25 Beyond specific architectural features, gender norms are further encoded through the separation of spaces of work and home, public and private. The continued underrepresentation of women in architectural and planning professions means that women’s experiences of and in these places are likely to be overlooked or based on outdated stereotypes. However, as Bondi notes, simply “adding” women to the profession or considering their experiences is inadequate on two fronts. Since women’s experiences are shaped by a patriarchal society, smoothing the rough edges of that experience via urban design doesn’t inherently challenge patriarchy itself. And second, assuming unity among women fails to account for other salient markers of social difference.
Historically, feminist geography—like academic feminism more widely—was concerned with “adding women” to a male-dominated discipline. The title of Janice Monk and Susan Hanson’s classic intervention from 1982 speaks loudly about the field’s biases: “On not excluding half of the human in human geography.”26 But the additive approach to addressing exclusion has always lacked transformative power.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Black and women of colour feminists like Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, and the women of the Combahee River Collective were challenging the mainstream women’s movement to come to terms with the different forms of oppression faced by women outside the white, heterosexual middle class. Their work led to the development of what we now call intersectional feminist theory, based on the term coined by Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 and further developed through the 1990s by Black feminists such as Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks.27 Intersectionality led to a radical shift in how feminism understood the relationships among various systems of privilege and oppression including sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, and ableism.
Feminist geographers faced especially rocky terrain in a discipline steeped in a history of exploration, imperialism, and discovery. The masculine, colonial tropes of intrepid explorers mapping the “new world” still ripple through the field of geography. Urban geographers seek out the next interesting neighbourhood to study and social group to classify, while planners aspire to heights of technical, rational, and objective decision-making about how people should live in cities. Feminist urban scholars pushed to have women recognized as valid and in some ways distinct urban subjects. But their early work lacked an intersectional analysis of how gender relations interlocked with race, class, sexuality, and ability.
Retracing the trajectory taken by academic feminism across many disciplines, feminist geographers often drew on their own experiences to explore how gender interlocked with other social inequalities and the role that space played in structuring systems of oppression. The early work of Gill Valentine, for example, investigated women’s fear of violence in public spaces but quickly evolved to examine lesbian experiences of everyday spaces, such as the street. Valentine faced years of professional harassment for her lesbian identity, yet work such as hers paved the way for sub-fields such as geographies of sexuality, lesbian geographies, and queer and trans geographies. Laura Pulido and Audrey Kobayashi drew on their experiences as women of colour in the discipline to call out geography’s whiteness and push feminists to examine the implicit whiteness behind their research topics and conceptual frameworks. Today, the work of scholars like Black feminist geographer Katherine McKittrick and Indigenous feminist geographer Sarah Hunt continues to challenge lingering anti-Black and colonial attitudes that reappear in feminist and critical urban geographies through our discourses, methods, and choice of research spaces.28
For me, to take a feminist stance on cities is to wrestle with a set of entangled power relationships. Asking “women’s questions” about the city means asking about so much more than gender. I have to ask how my desire for safety might lead to increased policing of communities of colour. I have to ask how my need for stroller access can work in solidarity with the needs of disabled people and seniors. I have to ask how my desire to “claim” urban space for women could perpetuate colonial practices and discourses that harm the efforts of Indigenous people to reclaim lands taken and colonized. Asking these kinds of questions requires an intersectional approach and some level of self-reflection on my own position.
Starting from my own body and my own experiences means starting from a pretty privileged space. As a white, cis, able-bodied woman I know that in most cases, I have the right kind of body for moving through the post-industrial, leisure, and consumption-oriented modern city. I speak English in an English-dominated country. I have formal citizenship in two nation-states. My settler status on Indigenous land is rarely questioned. I’m not Christian but being Jewish is unremarkable in Canada and not visible to most, although a resurgence of anti-Semitic rhetoric and violence makes me type that with a sense of increased wariness. In general, as someone who writes about gentrification for a living, I’m very aware that my body reads as a marker of successful “renewal,” signifying that a space is respectable, safe, middle-class, and desirable.
My body might also signify danger or exclusion for people of colour, Black people, trans folks, disabled people, Indigenous people, and others for whom spaces dominated by whiteness and normative bodies are not welcoming. My presence could suggest that a petty complaint to the manager or a life-threatening phone call to the police is a moment away. My comfort will likely be prioritized over their safety by those around me and by the city in general. While I can’t change most of the features that mark me in these ways, I can be aware of what my body signifies and check the impulse to assert that I can and should claim all urban spaces for my own. If my presence is going to lead to the further marginalization of already-struggling groups, then I need to strongly consider whether my presence there is necessary.
This embodied privilege doesn’t negate gendered fears and exclusions in my life. Rather, the privileges that I hold intersect with and inform my experiences as a woman. Throughout the book, I try to be transparent about what my partial perspective offers, and what it obscures. Working with the commitment to understand that all knowledge is situated—i.e., all knowledge comes from some-where—requires me to acknowledge that even where I am (or was) an “insider,” for example, in my hometown of Toronto, my perspective isn’t definitive.29 For many other cities that I write about, I’m an outsider, which means I must guard against reproducing sloppy stereotypes or problematic images of urban communities to which I don’t belong. I also have to be explicit about the fact that my urban experiences and my geographic expertise are rooted in global north cities and western bodies of research. While I’ve sought out relevant examples and case studies from a wider range of places, I’m not able to do justice to “women’s questions” arising from global south and Asian cities. This gulf is a persistent problem in feminist urban geography, one that many have identified as a key challenge for twenty-first century scholars.30
If you’ve flipped through to my author’s bio, you’ll have noted, maybe with some puzzlement, that I work at a small university in the territory of Mi’kma’ki in what’s currently known as eastern Canada. While we have indie cafés, a hipster bar, and even a gluten-free bakery, Sackville, New Brunswick is a rural town of around five thousand people. It sits about forty kilometres from the nearest city, Moncton, whose population would easily fit inside one London borough. Not exactly an urban hotspot. The pigeons that have set up camp on my office roof are the most urban element of my day. They scribble and scrabble their way across the slanted ceiling, cooing and fighting. The university is trying to get rid of them, but obviously I root for them to avoid their executioners.
I’ve lived here for ten years. When I was first offered a nine-month contract, I nearly turned it down after realizing how tiny Sackville was. “I can’t live there,” I thought. “I’ll turn it down tomorrow.” That’s how bound up the city was with my personal identity. After a restless night, though, I realized that as much as I loved Toronto, full-time employment wasn’t to be rejected. One contract stretched into three and finally a tenure-track appointment and tenure. Ten years. Long enough that I can no longer consider it a temporary relocation from Toronto. But I remain an urban geographer and a city lover.
Where to begin? Begin with the material. The matter of the body. Adrienne Rich lists the particularities of her body—scars, pregnancies, arthritis, white skin, no rapes, no abortions—as a reminder of how her body keeps her grounded in her own perspective, of what it allows her to write and speak. What does my body allow me to write and speak? I could begin with my once-pregnant body, sweating and nauseated on a north London train. I could begin with my tired shoulders, aching from forcing a stroller through ice-choked Toronto streets. I could begin with my feet, slipping gratefully out of my hot shoes and into the cool grass of High Park, where I lie back and people watch. This meeting point of bodies and cities is at the heart of “asking women’s questions” and thinking about the “feminist city.”
These questions ultimately have to help us imagine and enact different urban futures. Inequality, violence, and deprivation still plague cities around the world. Dangerous nationalist movements are finding expression in acts of white terrorism that target diverse urban communities. Climate change is bringing serious challenges to questions of where and how we live. And the effects of all of these issues are very much intertwined. Although large-scale changes at both individual and societal levels are required, we needn’t invent universalizing grand visions or utopian schemes in order to start making things different, better. Alternative visions already exist, both in design and in practice. From schemes to make public transportation safer for women to visions of police and prison abolition, activists, scholars, and everyday folks have long dreamed and theorized and practiced different ways of being together in cities. In fact, 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. Part of the challenge is recognizing where those alternatives are already in play and figuring out if they can be scaled up or adapted to different environments. In this book I’ll share a variety of those kinds of projects, both old and new. My hope is that you can learn to see those alternatives on the ground, to have your own conversations about gender, feminism, and city life and find your own ways to take action on doing cities differently.
