Cover Image: Feminist City

Feminist City

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The idea of gendered or feminist geography and cityscapes is really interesting, the author is scholarly in their approach to the topic which makes this book excellent to read as you can clearly see their expertise in the subject.

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Feminist City: A Field Guide is a look at urban planning through an intersectional feminist lens, written by feminist and urban geographer Leslie Kern. With no background in this topic, I was a bit worried that this would be inaccessible. But, through chapters titled City of Men, City of Moms, City of Friends, City of One, City of Protest, City of Fear, and City of Possibility, I was able to get an introduction to many of the challenges, nuances, and imagined futures of cities. Kern talks primarily about the current state of cities, and how urban life continues to challenge equality, but she also begins the discussion of potential solutions.

Cities were designed for cis able-bodied middle-class white men, by cis able-bodied white men. Women, LGBTQ+ individuals, people of color, individuals with disabilities, and individuals of a lower socioeconomic status who want to access public spaces and city services must come up with their own work-arounds and carve out their own spaces, since they are not the “ideal imagined users” in their cities. Women are expected to navigate a public transit system that is often inaccessible for people with disabilities or people with strollers, and that is designed for a linear trip from work to home, not accounting for picking up children or stopping at the grocery store. We are made to feel culpable for any assault or violence endured when we venture outside of our designated spaces, especially if we dared to go out on our own.

Importantly, Kern also addresses the contradictions of an intersectional feminist city, and how there is not a one-size-fits-all way to create a feminist city. For example, the development of feminized spaces like coffee shops and highly monitored housing complexes might feel like the creation of safe refuges for some, but often serve as signs of gentrification and increased danger for others. Historically, this has targeted people of color, as well as homeless people and sex workers, especially when a carceral approach is taken. It also creates the expectation that we must each buy our safety and be held responsible for our own protection.

It took about a month for me to get through this book, primarily because I had some trouble getting invested. However, I really enjoyed the later chapters, especially the chapters on fear and possibility, where Kern’s conclusions really shine. There were so many fascinating ideas in this book, and I would recommend it if you want to take a different view on urban living.

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It’s weird to think of buildings and places making equality harder. In Feminist City, Leslie Kern talks about the difficulties that we have using the environment that has been made around. Most of the challenges we face in navigating both urban and rural domestic settings is because it is literally man-made. A cis white straight average height, able-bodied male and the average nuclear family is typically the template used when building cities in the western world. When you go in to a bookshop and can’t reach the top shelf, if you use a wheelchair and find a tube station doesn’t have a way for you to get down to the platform or if you are transgender and struggling to use the public toilets it is unfortunately, because you are not average enough.

Throughout the book, Kern, talk about her own personal struggles and pleasures she found in an urban environment not built for someone like her. She highlights the way the city left her feeling exhausted as a mother and liberated as a young woman. In sections of the book she explains how her experience can often be one of heightened alert. The city can make women feel unsafe. Kern gets the reader to think about how women often have to walk home late at night with something from their handbags contorted in to some sort of make shift weapon because ineffective street lighting or the distance of a transport link to a residential area makes the short journey dangerous.

She talks about the relationships people form to create solutions to the challenges their local geography presents them with. For example, how women create groups to ensure that they are safe travelling around the city at night or the systems used to check that a lone female reaches their destinations safely.

When Kern goes through the way that different man-made environments neglect the needs of herself and her family because of her gender she offers solutions. However, Kern does point out that no solution is a one-size fits all remedy. She takes in to account her own privilege. What may make life easier for her as a cis white straight able-bodied female who is also a mother may make life harder for people with a different gender expression, skin colour, sexuality or physical ability.

The topics and subjects in this book are fascinating and after reading I had a completely different understanding of the world around me. It also brought to my attention a new awareness of my own body and the needs it has on a daily basis. I’ve always been annoyed when out with friends at the difficulty of finding public toilets that I feel comfortable in. As a woman who menstruates and has pretty angry crohn’s disease finding facilities that I don’t worry about using is a nightmare. I don’t want to queue. I don’t really want a cubicle. I want a room where I can do my business without someone impatiently banging on the door because they have been waiting in a queue for ages. I don’t want to feel embarrassed as I think about someone hearing me change my sanitary towel. This book enlightened me on how my gender and disability needs have been neglected and although this didn’t make me any less angry about the problem, it did give me some answers.

I enjoyed this book a lot and I had a great time reading it. I would recommend this book to those with an interest in intersectionality and feminist subjects. It is also great for future city planners!

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***I was granted an ARC of this via Netgalley from the publisher.***

Have you ever wondered about who cities are designed for? Probably not. In fact, you may have noted that cities could be designed better but probably never considered who would benefit from the design change. In the book, Feminist City: A Field Guide by Leslie Kern examines how cities can not only be designed better for women but also the positive and negative impact cities have on women’s lives. 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. For example, cities are not designed in ways to facilitate mothers with babies from no elevator access at some subway stations to few childcare centers near centers of work. 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. However, Kern points out the city serves as a useful backdrop for important female friendships and serves as the center for many protests that have helped women have their voices heard. The best thing about this book is the author’s emphasis on finding intersectional solutions to building a feminist city, solutions that should strive to help women of every race, class and ability. The author also points out that many current solutions are lacking in this aspect and perhaps there isn’t any way to help all types of women equally. However, she isn’t cynical about this and encourages the reader to strive to find better solutions. 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 you’re looking for a book that will challenge your thinking on women’s place in the city and how we can take steps to make them better and more efficient and safer for women of all walks of life, then I recommend this book for you. One of the best books I’ve read this year.

Rating: 5 stars. Would highly recommend to a friend.

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Leslie Kern’s “Feminist City” was my first encounter with feminist geography. It is something one intuitively can conceptualize, but not necessarily successfully define and put into words. The problem afflicts not just the outsiders to the field such as myself, but seemingly Leslie Kern as well, despite her career in researching and teaching the subject.

“Feminist City” is a loosely structured look at different issues faced by women in cities, how they intersect with other peoples’ identities, how they are are spoken about and researched, how, if at all, they are being addressed etc. Some were pretty obvious e.g. there is generally a lack of accommodation for strollers, which make lives for mothers harder, and is intertwined with lack of accommodations for the elderly or people with disabilities. Other things she points at were more of a discovery for me. For example, the feeling of comfort and safety for women is often seen as a marker of success by urban designers and planners, however, the woman in question is often a white middle class able-bodied woman, who is also inevitably a marker of gentrification and displacement of other groups, including other women. I am myself guilty of thinking this way, and even though her point may seem painfully clear, I have never considered it. Fascinating and educational.

Kern relies on solid research and writing by other authors, acknowledges what she highlights as women's urban problems are not simply feminist or simply urban issues and cannot necessarily be addressed by city design and policy solutions. She also describes her personal experiences throughout the book, almost using her life story to structure it. I neither like such approach in nonfiction in general, nor do I think it is warranted in the book. Feminist writing already suffers from being accused of (and actually being) too reliant on case studies and individual experiences. While they are significant, Kern’s point is very well made without any reference to them and perhaps would be even stronger without their inclusion.
Another letdown was lack of concrete solutions offered. Kern states that tactics to address existing issues are not limited to urban interventions and must be a product of collective, inclusive decision making, that a “feminist city” is not a singular vision, but an ongoing process. I buy that, but in a book about cities and a particular issue, examination of some specific urbanist solutions would be welcome. The closet she gets is mentioning some “defensible space” style interventions, which is great, but hardly enough to form a more general idea of the discipline's direction.

I felt a little betrayed knowing Leslie Kern has not lived in a city (she teaches in a college in a tiny town in a sparsely populated area) for a decade herself, yet fascinated with how her experiences as a city dweller at an earlier time were only very vaguely relatable to me. The sense of security and ownership I feel even in the most squalid of city neighborhoods leaves little place for outsider fascination or level of worry she brings up (though the familiar feelings of ownership and security are prominent too). Perhaps it is because I’ve never been a suburban transplant or because the instinctive safety precautions of varying travel patterns and having one’s keys at the ready are too internalized for me, but I hope it is because things have much improved since Leslie Kern was a teenager and lived a city life.

Anyway, this was a great short introduction to feminist geography, a well-done book in general and an educational pleasant read. Would recommend to people interested in cities, intersectional feminism or both.

Thanks to NetGalley for a digital ARC of the book.

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This is a book about what it would be like if we can imagine a feminist city and how the current geographies of cities impact women. Geography here means our relationships with the environment and how we interact with it and how it interacts with us in a way. It predominantly focuses on the geographic perspective of gender and how sexism functions on the ground.

There's a lot about this book that is fascinating and seeing the dots being connected just continues to show how strongly patriarchal values are embedded in our system. The author talks a lot about intersectional identities as well and how it comes to play in navigating spaces.

However, after the first few chapters the text slowly started to feel as if it was repetitive but phrased differently. The ideas stayed the same and the book could have been shorter. It took me a looong time to finish this book even though it wasn't huge. There are points where I thought what would happen if changes were made or what are the effects, and I wanted that to be explored more than the general concept of we will now be living in a feminist diverse city; I wanted things to go a level deeper.

But this is the first book I read that discusses this topic from this perspective and I am interested to learn more.

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This started off strong, but at about 40% through, I found myself losing interest.
I think Kern makes really valid points and I think urban planning with inclusion in mind is important, but I'm not sure an entire book about it is necessary for those who don't work in the urban planning spaces.
I'd also suggest maybe adding a bit more about the WHY. Like why should we care that spaces cater to women, mothers etc. As a woman, I can understand, but non-women might not.
For example, I'm not a mother, so I found it hard to sympathise with why it was necessary for mothers to be able to access non-essentials starbucks or shops etc in the chapter about cities and motherhood. I live in a busy, overpopulated city, so to me, someone dragging a stroller onto the tube in rush hour is just annoying. My brain automatically goes to "Why didn't they use a strap on carrier" instead of "the tube should have more space for strollers".

I'd like to be able to sympathise though, but this chapter didn't do enough to get me to buy into it and I think that's a recurring theme throughout. Kern makes valid points, but she's preaching to the choir rather than trying to convert the others. This book would be a lot more powerful if spoke to a wider audience, rather than an echo chamber. A wonderful example of an author who's done this is Reni Eddo-Lodge. I am not a black woman, yet after reading her work, I have a far better insight into the things PoC face and things I should be more aware of, avoid doing, and how in small ways I can help when I see injustices.

In an ideal world, we'd all care about the needs of each other, but we don't live in an ideal world, and most of us are blind to things others face. I would strongly suggest getting more feedback from non-women and seeing how this book resonates (or not) with them.

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