Gendering The City

Extrait de la couverture : "Gendering the city provides a significant contribution to urban studies, balancing critiques of domination with analyses of how groups and individuals have actively carved out spaces that resist and recofigure dominant gender regimes. The collection draws on a wide range of empirical work, conducted in both canada and the United States, to explore the diversity of women's experiences. It is both grounded and provocative. - Ann Forsyth, Harvard University Graduate School of Design."

Men and women experience the city differently in a myriad of ways. An analysis of urban and gender studies, as co-constitutive subjects, is long overdue. This book is a systematic treatment of urban and gender studies combined. It presents both a feminist critique of mainstream urban policy and planning, plus a gendered reorientation of key urban social, environmental and city-regional debates.

When a recent wave of condominium development overtook Toronto, women emerged as powerful consumers, and reports claimed that home ownership was offering young, single women freedom, financial independence, and personal security. Sex and the Revitalized City examines the truth of these claims by exploring the phenomenon from the perspective of women condo owners and planners and developers. This fresh perspective on urban revitalization reveals that condo ownership is not freeing women from constraints – neoliberal ideologies are remaking women's relationship with the city in the image of fast capital and consumer citizenship. Women's emancipation through condominium ownership is a marketing ploy rather than a major shift in gender relations.

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.

The changing nature of waged work in contemporary advanced industrial nations is one of the most significant aspects of political and economic debate. It is also the subject of intense debate among observers of gender. Capital Culture explores these changes focusing particularly on the gender relations between the men and women who work in the financial services sector. The multiple ways in which masculinities and femininities are constructed is revealed through the analysis of interviews with dealers, traders, analysts and corporate financiers. Drawing on a range of disciplinary approaches, the various ways in which gender segregation is established and maintained is explored. In fascinating detail, the everyday experiences of men and women working in a range of jobs and in different spaces, from the dealing rooms to the boardrooms, are examined. This volume is unique in focusing on men as well as women, showing that for men too there are multiple ways of doing gender at work.

Feminist Spaces introduces students and academic researchers to major themes and empirical studies in feminist geography. It examines new areas of feminist research including: embodiment, sexuality, masculinity, intersectional analysis, and environment and development. In addition to considering gender as a primary subject, this book provides a comprehensive overview of feminist geography by highlighting contemporary research conducted from a feminist framework which goes beyond the theme of gender to include issues such as social justice, activism, (dis)ability, and critical pedagogy. Through case studies, this book challenges the construction of dichotomies that tend to oversimplify categories such as developed and developing, urban and rural, and the Global North and South, without accounting for the fluid and intersecting aspects of gender, space, and place. The chapters weave theoretical and empirical material together to meet the needs of students new to feminism, as well as those with a feminist background but new to geography, through attention to basic geographical concepts in the opening chapter. The text encourages readers to think of feminist geography as addressing not only gender, but a set of methodological and theoretical perspectives applied to a range of topics and issues. A number of interactive exercises, activities, and ‘boxes’ or case studies, illustrate concepts and supplement the text. These prompts encourage students to explore and analyze their own positionality, as well as motivate them to change and impact their surroundings. Feminist Spaces emphasizes activism and critical engagement with diverse communities to recognize this tradition in the field of feminism, as well as within the discipline of geography. Combining theory and practice as a central theme, this text will serve graduate level students as an introduction to the field of feminist geography, and will be of interest to students in related fields such as environmental studies, development, and women’s and gender studies.

Engendering Cities examines the contemporary research, policy, and practice of designing for gender in urban spaces. Gender matters in city design, yet despite legislative mandates across the globe to provide equal access to services for men and women alike, these issues are still often overlooked or inadequately addressed. This book looks at critical aspects of contemporary cities regarding gender, including topics such as transport, housing, public health, education, caring, infrastructure, as well as issues which are rarely addressed in planning, design, and policy, such as the importance of toilets for education and clothes washers for freeing-up time. In the first section, a number of chapters in the book assess past, current, and projected conditions in cities vis-à-vis gender issues and needs. In the second section, the book assesses existing policy, planning, and design efforts to improve women’s and men’s concerns in urban living. Finally, the book proposes changes to existing policies and practices in urban planning and design, including its thinking (theory) and norms (ethics). The book applies the current scholarship on theory and practice related to gender in a planning context, elaborating on some critical community-focused reflections on gender and design. It will be key reading for scholars and students of planning, architecture, design, gender studies, sociology, anthropology, geography, and political science. It will also be of interest to practitioners and policy makers, providing discussion of emerging topics in the field.

This book investigates the gender revolution in urban planning and public policy. Building on feminist urban studies, it introduces the concept of genderfication as a means of understanding the consequences of post-Fordist gender notions for the city. It traces the changes in western urban gender relations, arguing that in the post-Fordist urban landscape gender is used for urban planning and public policy – both to rebrand a city’s image and to produce space for gender-equal ideals, often at the cost of precarious urban populations. This is a topic that remains largely unexplored in critical urban studies and radical geography. Chapters cover how Jane Jacobs’ perspectives provide an alternative to the patriarchal modernist city for contemporary planners and using Rotterdam as a case study Van Den Berg discusses why new urban planning methods focus on attracting women and children as new urbanites. Topics include: forms of place marketing, gender as a repertoire for contemporary urban Imagineering and the concept of urban re-generation. The final chapter investigates how cities aiming to redefine themselves imagine future populations and how they design social policies that explicitly and particularly target women as mothers. Scholars in all fields of urban studies will find this work thought-provoking, instructive and informative.