Feminist City
Claiming Space in a Man-Made World
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Feminist City is an ongoing experiment in living differently, living better, and living more justly in an urban world.
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. The urban streets often are a place of threats rather than community. Gentrification has made the everyday lives of women even more difficult. What would a metropolis for working women look like? A city of friendships beyond Sex and the City. A transit system that accommodates mothers with strollers on the school run. A public space with enough toilets. A place where women can walk without harassment.
In Feminist City, through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities built into our cities, homes, and neighborhoods. Kern offers an alternative vision of the feminist city. Taking on fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, and the joys and perils of being alone, Kern maps the city from new vantage points, laying out an intersectional feminist approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future. It is time to dismantle what we take for granted about cities and to ask how we can build more just, sustainable, and women-friendly cities together.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this insightful scholarly work, Kern (Sex and the Revitalized City), a professor of geography and environment at Mount Allison University, uses the framework of "feminist geography" to explore how women interact with and are affected by urban spaces. Contending that the structural realities and power dynamics of cities privilege white males, Kern shares her personal experiences as a college student "perform acts of safety and precaution" with female friends in Toronto, and as a stroller-pushing, multitasking mother attempting to navigate London's public transportation system. She acknowledges that the space she inhabits as a white, able-bodied woman holds inherent privilege in relation to the experiences of women of color and disabled people, and notes that many things that make affluent white women feel safer, such as avoiding "dangerous" areas and increased policing, negatively impact the lives of sex workers, immigrants, queer people, and minorities, while doing nothing to abolish the patriarchy. Kern defends women's experiences of fear as rational reactions to the urban environment, and hopes that increased representation among urban planners and policy makers will result in more inclusive cityscapes. Her mix of the personal and the academic reveals the nature of the problem, but offers few concrete answers. This provocative analysis will resonate with theoretically minded feminists.