I absolutely loved this book. It was informative, insightful and utterly compelling. Kern has such a clear, strong writing voice, and truly inspiring. I really appreciated how the book was clearly signposted, and explored different versions of womanhood and how this affects our interactions with this city/what we require from the city. My favourite chapter was 'City of Friends', as I related to it most strongly, however, I truly learnt so much from every page. It has changed the way I interact with my city, An essential read for every woman.

In the vein of Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Feminist City points out how the world was not only designed by men, but for men, leaving out the female perspective either deliberately and maliciously or out of pure ignorance. I definitely connected with this book as a young professional woman who lives in a city - I love when a book makes you realize that these seemingly innate habits we develop are actually a response to a patriarchal environment and you go "Oh yeah, that's why that sucks." This book is well-written, accessible, and deeply compelling (at least to me). I don't have any formal background in geography or urban planning and I expected that to be a detriment, or that I would at least have to do some Googling to follow the arguments, but I was pleasantly surprised at the lack of jargon and clear explanation of specific subtopics in those fields. All in all, I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the subject matter—and if I didn't reserve my five star ratings for books that literally changed my life, this would be an easy five stars.

I didn't love this one and it didn't draw me in like I was hoping! However, I appreciated the author's spin on a "feminist city" and the expansive worldview.

This book examines the ways in which urban areas are designed without the foresight of women's needs and how these designs and issues exacerbate issues of intersectional feminism. As a scholar I enjoyed the prose of this book, but I think someone uninterested in the research side of these issues would be frustrated with this book, as it does not offer much in way of solutions or insight for activists and city planners.

I found the book very insightful and inspirational. Even though it is hard to find straight forward solutions to the problems raised by Leslie Kern, it provides food for thought on the role of friendship for advancing feminist causes and ideas on how can we address or re-thing some of the existing challenges by taking an intersectional approach.
Reading it during the partial lockdown, it made me look at the restrictive measures in a different way - as they seem to mostly be tailored to create less inconvenience for heterosexual families with kids, while the needs of other groups are reflected in a lesser proportion.

Concise, scholarly, and personal survey of feminist geography of the city, looking at how cities are designed to perpetuate comfort and power for certain members of society (mass transit systems more often than not are set up for funneling white collar workers to and from urban cores and not for making it easy to do inter- or inner-city trips to school, errands, work, and back again) and how cities can be used as hotbeds of activism and social change. Has a very nice focus on intersectionality. Worth a read!

I really enjoyed this book, I give it 4 stars.

It was so refreshing and fascinating. I found myself nodding along a lot and spoke to all my friends to spark discussions.

I would recommend this book.

This book is very relevant, the author brings up super valid and current debate on how the cities are planned based on a patriarchal society perspective that ignores women’s and other minorities needs and right to the cities. Even though the book focus on the women’s perspective, it does not limit itself to it and I think that was a big plus to me. I would totally recommend this book!

An interesting book reimagining urban planning with women at the center of the conversation. Many cities are designed without taking women’s lives and how they move and behave into account. This book does just that through sharing various research. This is extremely on brand for me and this wasn’t my favorite representation of it. The info isn’t new or presented in an interesting way. It was okay for me.

This is such a fantastic title. Leslie Kern masterfully combines a personal memoir and an academic book. The result is a well-researched, relatable, honest, and wonderfully readable book. Kern's approach is very intersectional and her knowledge of geography studies is impeccable. But the book is so much more than an analysis of how cities are rigged against women; she analyzes many other related things, such as media representations of female friendships and their relationships with cities; pregnancy and everyone's feeling of entitlement to a woman's pregnant body; violence of the cities' surveillance technology against people of color; white flight and the rise of suburbia, and many other aspects of the ways cities we live in are not feminist - and how they can be remade. Highly recommended.

"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" - Feminist geographer Jane Darke, quoted in Feminist City

I identify as a feminist, but I'll admit I had never heard of feminist geography. This book was a concise, readable introduction to this complex topic. Kern did a great job interweaving her personal experience with her scholarship. I also really appreciated her focus on intersectional feminism; she gives concrete examples of interventions that were intended to help women but in fact hurt women of color. Kern writes in a semi-academic style, but the book is accessible to a general audience.

Readers who enjoyed Invisible Women will likely find this a good read. I would recommend this book to anyone who identifies as a feminist or wants to learn more about feminist geography.

Thank you to Verso Books for providing an ARC on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed this book! I have a background in gender studies (way back in my college days), but I had never read much from the perspective of a feminist geographer. What is feminist geography? You can think of it as the study of how gender affects how humans live in, interact with, and take up space in their environment. This book focuses purely on urban environments and tackles several major topics, including motherhood, friendship, safety, and protest/activism.

Due to my background I was familiar with a lot of the concepts discussed in this book, but many concepts were presented from an angle I had never considered before. The author drew some fresh connections for me that will change the way I think about urban space and my own safety and interaction with my environment.

This was a wonderful book, and an absolutely excellent synopsis of the issues women face in urban environments. The author does an excellent job tackling the topics in the book with intersectional awareness and a keen eye toward the privileges some women hold from which other women don’t benefit. This book made me more keenly aware of my privileges as a white woman.

The language in the book is plain and accessible and the author’s sources are well cited. She is transparent on her own viewpoint/privileges, and forthcoming with narratives from her own life, along with a keen analysis of her experiences. This is in addition to the excellent overview she provides of concepts and theory from feminist geography as it pertains to the topics she covers.

There were a few places I did feel the reader needed to have some basic understanding of feminist theory and race or class issues to be able to be sold on the theories presented. If I were a professor teaching this book, I would save it for after some basic reading on sexual/gendered violence, racial tensions, etc. However I think that’s okay; this book is meant to be a feminist geography introduction, not gender studies or social justice 101. However, if someone wasn’t sold on feminism, anti-racism, or social justice as a concept already, this book might seem less convincing to them because it does assume the reader has some basic familiarity with these concepts.

Overall I really really liked this book and I plan to purchase a copy when it comes out. It is also incredibly prescient for the times - I read the activism chapter on the Friday night the George Floyd protests reached a peak in my local area. It felt quite surreal, and extremely relevant.

I received a digital copy of this book from Net Galley, in exchange for an honest review.

Very well researched and a timely release. This is a must buy book. Urban women and women who wish to move to urban spaces and take up positions in the urban society can easily relate. Keep up the good work.

Who does a city belong to? How is a city experienced by women and other marginalised groups? Leslie Kern says, "The imagined city is shaped by experience, media, art, rumour, and our own desires and fears." This is one of those books that deconstructs ideas about something that you may have never paid attention to in the past - urban spaces. "The feminist city is an ongoing experiment in living differently, living better, and living more justly in an urban world." Read it.

A very interesting academic book on women's views on the city (cities) they live in, with in-depth analysis of the gender-specific experiences of public spaces, and tons of sources to back up every argument made by the author.
To put in the hands of all your friends interested in feminism, social inequalities and the sociology of urban spaces.

3.5 stars. This upcoming non-fiction book, set to release in the U.S. on July 7 by Verso, provides a detailed exploration of the ways in which the key concepts of intersectional feminism interact and are exacerbated by urban spaces and urbanism more broadly. If this is a subject that interests you, and you are looking for an academic perspective on this topic (that is still fairly readable) I would recommend you check this out. Kern is a strong writer and this book has five clear chapters ("City of Moms," "City of Friends", "City of One", "City of Protest", and "City of Fear") that utilize a variety of sources, ranging from academic texts, trade publishing books, and media entertainment like t.v. shows and movies, to provide examples of different ways women (and other marginalized groups) use cities or struggle to use cities.

Personally, however, this book felt a bit too academically-focused for me. As someone who is looking to enter the urban planning profession, I was hoping this would be a bit more of a solution and case-study based approach to examining how cities can be created with a gendered lens and how intersectional feminism can be utilized in producing more equitable, usable cities. Instead, Kern relies heavily on what is typical in academic writing (something that I personally have grappled with regarding academia more broadly): a critique of existing systems without providing solutions. While I completely understand the use of critique in the greater academic canon, I still personally prefer more solution-based non-fiction with a subject matter such as this. This did lower my rating, but I believe that may be in part because of my expectations of what Feminist City would be, as I do find the content of this to be important and the work itself to be cohesive and well-written!

I really enjoyed this book about feminist geography. This is a topic that I often see being briefly mentioned in books about feminism, but I never read a book that focused on only covering this topic. I believe people don't give it enough attention.

There were many things I liked about this book. Some specific topics I was already aware of, but it was still very interesting to read more about them. Others surprised me because, even though they are fairly obvious once someone points it out, I have not given them enough of my attention in the past.
What I enjoyed the most was that the book felt inclusive from page 1. It was a very natural way of including everyone, which I prefer over the sort of "forced inclusivity" we see nowadays. And this book had a couple of moments when that was present too. It's like we need to mention the same speech every time, so people get that we are inclusive. And this book was doing that already in the natural way I mentioned, hence why this bothered me slightly.
The author and I disagree in a couple of topics and that's absolutely fine. My ideology doesn't have to be the same as every single feminist.

Overall, I highly recommend this book. It has very important information that people need to be aware of in order for the world to move forward.

Feminist City isn't an interesting sci-fi novel, but a non-fiction book about how cities are not designed with women in mind. I agree with that thesis as it happens, having read material on this subject before. This is why I requested this book. It never hurts to learn more, especially if you're interested in female issues and especially if you're a novelist who's always open to ideas for plots or at least ideas for how to make characters who are a different gender than your own seem more lifelike, realistic, motivated, and perhaps having issues to pursue!

This take on cities is a very personal view, and I have to say that the author went off on tangents that for me, didn't serve her main argument well. For example, at one point she devolved into discussing how movies don't tend to represent female relationships. I'm like what? The thing is that after rambling about this and even mentioning a couple of movies that do represent them, the author then got into a prolonged ramble about some TV shows I've never heard of that represent female relationships pretty well. I'm like: are you not undermining your own claim with this?

And what does it have to do with your thesis about cities not being female-friendly? I don't mind it when authors mention stuff tangential to their main thrust, but a digression like this seemed to be an extended reminiscence about her own favorite TV shows rather than anything that materially contributed to her argument. And lest it be forgotten, TV and movies are not reality, even when they're called 'reality shows'. In fact reality shows are the precise opposite of reality. They're as artificial as it gets.

The author lives in Canada so maybe these are Canadian TV shows or maybe they're just shows I never had an interest in. She seems to be forgetting that unless the movie topic is specifically about female friendships, the writer and director had no reason to go out of their way to tell a story about such things because the movie's story is about something else.

Despite her claim, there are in fact many movies that do have female friendship represented in them not as the main plot, but as an included element. Also there are many movies about female friendships. The author, despite writing a book herself, seems to be unaware that there's a whole genre of novels precisely about female friendships! I guess she doesn't read much fiction, but Netflix has a bunch of movies about female relationships and friendships, so I don't get this fruitless digression into fiction when she's supposed to be making a case for a real world issue.

Another thing that struck me as odd in a feminist book was her digression into the topic of the 'Flâneuse'. I'd never encountered this name before, but it's a French word that describes the kind of person who has sufficient idle time on their hands that they can perambulate the city, exploring it and people-watching. I've never been a fan of pretentious French words being introduced into the lingo, but this one is quiet ancient. The original term was Flâneur, and I while I understand that in the ancient past, a term specific to a woman was routinely coined, particularly in a language that absurdly insists that inanimate objects have gender, I don't get why this was perpetuated by a writer of a book like the one under review here. Nor do I see why a woman can't be a Flâneur and leave it at that.

To me it was disturbing to find a female author of a book, and especially a book decidedly aligning with feminism, seeking to employ a female version of the word. If we're about equality, shouldn't one word serve all genders? It's the same case in Hollywood: why actress and not actor for all? We don't call a female doctor a doctrix! We no longer use aviatrix! Why perpetuate the erroneous idea that a female needs to be singled out a special case? Now I'm digressing! I freely admit that this is a pet beef of mine, and fortunately the whole book was not like this.

For me the author was at her best when relating, anecdotal as they were, stories of contending with urban environments while also contending first with a pregnancy and then with a baby on board - that is, onboard a carrier or a stroller. This was in London where the deeply subterranean underground railway, aka 'The Tube' was effectively inaccessible to anyone with a perambulator and pretty much the same even with a stroller. The fact is that the London Underground is a resistance movement: it's antique for the most part, and resists change for a variety of reasons.

Women were largely unseen and herded, back when most of it was built, and while that's no excuse to persist with that idiocy today, it has to be said - given how old the system is - that perhaps it's harder than it might seem to upgrade it appropriately, which is why the inaccessibility problem persists. Not that I'm trying to justify it; it needs to be fixed, not just for moms, but for people who have disabilities. And fear of heights in some London stations (just kidding)! To me it seems that the real problem is that these things cost money, and the will to make those expenditures is lacking among authorities that are largely male, white, and not sporting any differently-abled status. Once that complexion is changed, the rest ought to follow. I hope.

One thing in this discussion of the London tube was when I read (of the author's experience while pregnant): "This was most obvious to me on the Tube, where I was rarely offered a seat during my rush hour commute." While I understand that pregnancy involves carrying around extra weight and fatigue along with a young life, at times the author seems like she's equating being pregnant with being an invalid! This seems as unkind as it is inaccurate. Not every woman feels disabled by her pregnancy. Some do, and clearly there's an issue here, but the wording might have been less ambiguous.

Clearly there ought to be an offer of a seat, leaving it up to the individual to accept or decline as she sees fit. But I didn't see how this was so much an issue with cities not being designed for women. I mean it's always possible to await the next train since they run so frequently during rush hour, and get in there ahead of the crowd to find a seat. To me this seemed much more of a societal issue, with people in general largely being selfish despite attempts by the news media to show how kind we are. If we were truly that kind, it would hardly be a news item now, would it?!

I went into this book thinking it would answer a question that's asked in the book description. I know authors typically don't write these descriptions any more than they design the covers, but it was a question I would have liked to have had answered. The question was "What would a metropolis for working women look like?" and the problem seemed to be that this book isn't an organized journey through the issues, laying out the problems and supplying answers, or at least offering suggestions toward answers. This book is more like a collection of essays and it's a bit repetitive and lacking in substance. It's more like an impressionist painting where I'd have preferred - on this occasion - a photograph, and for me it really didn't get where it ought to have been trying to go - where it suggested it would go.

The problems with cities were highlighted here and there such as for example, the aforesaid lack of elevators on London's underground system, and the sparsity in the design of public toilets (where these can be found and even if they are in good condition). Some of the issues were less about the design of cities and more about societal issues, such as the idea of "A place where women can walk without harassment." No design of any city is going to prevent this as long as men think women are property, possessions, playthings, or people who are to be treated like juveniles. Even the most perfectly designed city will be nightmarish if it's populated by a significant assortment of jerks and dicks.

One of the ongoing problems with cities and one which was not addressed here is that cities are not communities no matter how well they are designed. No matter how much, say, New Yorkers (or alternatively the media) like to pretend their city is a community, it's in actual fact a large, impersonal city and most people are out for themselves, attending to their own plans and business, and with little time to consider others. This is normal in cities.

That's not to say it's right or that it can't be better, but it is the status quo. Something that would improve the situation would be to design cities not as cities but as conglomerations of small communities, wherein the community is more like a village while still being part go the whole, but even Cuomo's fine words about looking toward an improved future, post-covid 19 (assuming there ever is a post-covid 19) are going to lead nowhere without serious infrastructure changes and attitude modifications. Some systems can be improved, but unless you knock down the whole city and redesign it from the ground up, it will never be ideal.

That doesn't mean there's no room for improvements or that we cannot make cities better even as they stand, but the problem is that there are many interests in the city, and cities have grown the way they have because of those interests, most of which are about making money, not about making sense. None of this was addressed in this book, which in the end was much more a collection of personal anecdotes and ideas about problems than it was about how to get there from here.

It was a bit rambling and a bit repetitive, and overall, I was disappointed in it. Thus I'm unable to commend this as a worthy read because it doesn't really deliver on what it promises. It takes one or two interesting steps in that direction, but it's a long journey and this doesn't cover anywhere near enough of the distance there to make for a satisfying read

“Feminist City” investigates the impact of the white patriarchy on how women navigate urban spaces. Although it’s something that I hadn’t really thought about until now, it immediately made sense to me. I knew that when NASA began recruiting women astronauts, the biggest hurdle was that all the equipment was designed by men, for men, so either women had to adjust how they used it (a difficulty in addition to, you know, SPACE FLIGHT), or NASA had to spend the money to overhaul everything. So the idea that cities have been built by, overwhelmingly, straight white men, for straight white men, and exclude how literally everyone else uses cities, putting them in the most vulnerable positions? Yep, I’m there, tell me more.

It explores the breadth and depth of city life, how different people use public areas and how they’re clearly designed for men without children and periods. The book is enlightening and the problems it spotlights are endlessly frustrating. I wish there were clear, easy answers to how to make a city not only safe but also navigable and useable for marginalized people, and it’s not the book’s fault that the answers so far are few.

This year, my goal is to read all the books on Kate Harding’s syllabus for “A Master Class in Woman’s Rage,” and “Feminist City” should 100% be added to it. It’s comprehensive and well written, and it brought the receipts. It’s going to be the go-to book for anyone looking to overhaul the patriarchal leanings of traditional urban planning and redesign.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

A much needed book in a world that is changed faster than ever. Reminds me very much of the book Invisible Women. A must-read for everyone