Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World

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Dari Feminist City aku banyak belajar kalau masih ada banyak pekerjaan rumah dalam sebuah kota untuk menjadikan kotanya benar-benar layak huni. Wanita hamil pasti langsung terlihat di keramaian ( being seen) namun sayangnya, ruang geraknya di fasilitas publik terbatas. The author talks a lot about intersectional identities as well and how it comes to play in navigating spaces. 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. If this is a publishing decision to make the book more readable and approachable, it has certainly worked, because the book is highly readable and accessible.

We use cookies on this site to understand how you use our content, and to give you the best browsing experience.I also don't think the London/Canadian city focus was a negative for the book as it served to strengthen her arguments and she offered multiple references to other works by feminist geographers and particularly feminist geographers of colour. Also, the author shows how important is it for a woman to occupy her own space in the city but how hard it is do so in peace and dealing with the threat of violence.

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.In providing such self-reflection, she acknowledges her position as a white, middle-class, cisgender woman, although this acknowledgement is not always apparent throughout the chapters, leading to an intermittent positionality problem in which the author becomes both an insider and outsider to certain inequalities that concern, for instance, particular racial and sexual minorities.

Despite some progress, women, disabled people, people of colour, gender and sexual minorities, immigrants as well as Indigenous communities are still being marginalised and excluded from decision- and policymaking processes. Leslie Kern's Feminist City is a tremendously readable and fascinating introduction to feminist geography, and how cities are frequently designed and built to be hostile to women. 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. Here, the ‘gentrification of parenting’ emerges as a result of ‘intensive mothering’, a process in which the individual mother is held responsible for child-centred, labour-intensive, financially expensive and emotionally absorbing childcare ( Sharon Hays, 1996), and the ‘mystique of motherhood’, a view that glorifies motherhood as the ultimate achievement of women ( Andrea O’Reilly, 2010). While recognising the concerns of Kern, the broader scope of this gender mainstreaming approach, I argue, has the potential to pave the way for a more inclusive urban space.Nonetheless, excepting the few points mentioned above, Feminist City’s broad scope, structured around an intersectional feminist approach, successfully grapples with the most recent debates that have emerged at the intersections of race, gender, class and sexualities. And you might love it too, if you: believe in valuing and celebrating care work; joke about (or sincerely dream of) living in a commune with all your dearest friends someday; want a book on urbanism that isn't all about America, for once! And she still manages to touch in on other cities and make broader observations about cities in general. When I posted this book on my Instagram story, I soon received an essay-masquerading-as-a-DM from someone in my hometown. Blending scholarly insight with personal experience and notes from popular culture, the author explores how the ways in which we navigate work, motherhood, friendship, activism, violence, and being a woman at large is shaped by cities that are built to exclude our bodies.

She graduated in Architecture at the University of Cagliari in 2011 and obtained a Master of Science in Human Settlements at the KU Leuven, Belgium, in 2014. Kern maintains that cities are generally designed with white able-bodied men in mind and points out the deficiencies in cities that make it harder for women to live there. Thus, while I understand that the book is centred around self-reflection, the incorporation of urban feminist knowledge from the Global South would make the analysis more convincing and generalisable.bom parar pra analisar outras realidades, de outros pontos de vista, sobre uma tarefa que para nós - homens brancos - é extremamente comum e sem preocupações: usar as cidades e os centros urbanos. The book is filled with an enormous sense of entitlement and self-righteousness – the author projects her experiences and feelings onto every woman, and, by contrast, alleges that men need to have opposite experiences and feelings by default.