Leslie Kern

Feminist City: A Field Guide

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 woman 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 are built into our cities, homes, and neighbourhoods. And 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 a feminist intersectional 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 care-full cities together.

Claiming Space in a Man-Made World

Feminist City

How Gentrification is killing our cities, and what we can do about it What does gentrification look like? Can we even agree that it is a process that replaces one community with another? It is a question of class? Or of economic opportunity? Who does it affect the most? Is there any way to combat it? Leslie Kern, author of the best selling Feminist City, travels from Toronto, New York, London, Paris and San Francisco and scrutinises the myth and lies that surround this most urgent urban crisis of our times. First observed in 1950s London, and theorised by leading thinkers such as Ruth Glass, Jane Jacobs and Sharon Zukin, this devastating process of displacement now can be found in every city and most neighbourhoods. Beyond the Yoga studio, farmer's market and tattoo parlour, gentrification is more than a metaphor, but impacts the most vulnerable communities. Kern proposes an intersectional way at looking at the crisis that seek to reveal the violence based on class, race, gender and sexuality. She argues that gentrification is not natural That it can not be understood in economics terms, or by class. That it is not a question of taste. That it can only be measured only by the physical displacement of certain people. Rather, she argues, it is an continuation of the setter colonial project that removed natives from their land. And it can be seen today is rising rents and evictions, transformed retail areas, increased policing and broken communities. But if gentrification is not inevitable, what can we do to stop the tide? In response, Kern proposes a genuinely decolonial, feminist, queer, anti-gentrification. One that demands the right to the city for everyone and the return of land and reparations for those who have been displaced.

Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies

La città femminista. La lotta per lo spazio in un mondo disegnato da uomini

From the author of the best-selling Feminist City, this urbanite’s guide to gentrification knocks down the myths and exposes the forces behind the most urgent housing crisis of our time. Gentrification is no longer a phenomenon to be debated by geographers or downplayed by urban planners—it’s an experience lived and felt by working-class people everywhere. Leslie Kern travels to Toronto, Vancouver, New York, London, and Paris to look beyond the familiar and false stories we tell ourselves about class, money, and taste. What she brings back is an accessible, radical guide on the often-invisible forces that shape urban neighbourhoods: settler-colonialism, racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, and more. Gentrification is not inevitable if city lovers work together to turn the tide. Kern examines resistance strategies from around the world and calls for everyday actions that empower everyone, from displaced peoples to long-time settlers. We can mobilize, demand reparations, and rewrite the story from the ground up.

Gentrification Is Inevitable and Other Lies

Miasto dla kobiet

"À qui appartient la ville? Sûrement pas aux femmes. Souvent le théâtre des violences ordinaires ou frontales, la ville repose sur des fondations sexistes. Kern s'attarde à la manière dont les relations de genre, de classe, de race, d'âge se déploient dans la ville. Elle nous invite à redéfinir et à nous réapproprier les espaces urbains. Comment rendre nos villes plus féministes? Partant de son expérience quotidienne de citadine à différentes époques de sa vie (enfant, adolescente, étudiante, travailleuse, militante et mère), elle s'appuie sur les théories d'urbanisme, des travaux de géographes féministes et des références à la culture pop pour montrer comment une ville genrée qui s'embourgeoise exclut les populations marginalisées, mais également pour évoquer les possibles configurations d'une ville plus inclusive."--

notes de terrain

Ville féministe

Feminist Sehir

Ciudad feminista de Leslie Kern explica con ejemplos prácticos cómo la planificación de los espacios públicos diseñados desde y hacia una experiencia masculina afecta a las mujeres y otras identidades. El espacio público no es neutral. Los metros cuadrados asignados a los baños públicos y la forma de segmentarlos, las paradas de colectivos, la iluminación de las calles, caminar entre la gente en una avenida principal, o sentarse a leer en un bar tienen distintas implicancias si se piensa en el cruce del género con otras variables como: la etnicidad, la edad, la diversidad funcional, la clase social y la identidad sexual. Es imposible transitar este libro y volver a mirar la ciudad de la misma forma. “Como mujer, nunca había conocido un anonimato o una invisibilidad totales en la ciudad. La anticipación constante de una situación de acoso significaba que dejarse fluir en la multitud fuera siempre una posibilidad algo esquiva. Con todo, los privilegios de tener piel blanca y un cuerpo sin discapacidades me garantizaban algún grado de invisibilidad.” Leslie Kern

La lucha por el espacio en un mundo diseñado por hombres

Ciudad feminista

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.

Leslie Kern

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