Feminist City. Leslie Kern

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.

FEMINIST GEOGRAPHY

      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