Leslie Kern

Feminist City: A Field Guide

"First published in Canada in 2019 by Between the Lines, Toronto, Canada"--Title page verso.

Claiming Space in a Man-made World

Feminist City

Dora Tominic

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.

Claiming Space in a Man-Made World

Adoreeeeed it! Intersectional, thought through and well written! 

antonia maria wagner she/they

Audrey Kalman

DE review: https://www.dailyemerald.com/arts-cul...

Taylor

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 received an ARC of this book from NetGalley.

Celine Nguyen ✿

Leslie Kern's Feminist City is a tremendously readable and fascinating introduction to feminist geography, and how cities are frequently designed and built to be hostile to women. Kern clearly loves cities, and believes in their potential: "The city is the place where women had choices open up for them that were unheard of in small towns and rural communities. Opportunities for work. Breaking free of parochial gender norms. Avoiding heterosexual marriage and motherhood…Developing new kinship networks and foregrounding friendships…"

But Kern is also critical of where architects, urban planners, and geographers have assumed a white, male default when thinking about cities—and how this has led to urban landscapes that frequently inhibit, frustrate, and even endanger women. She expands her argument across 4 succinct chapters: 'City of Moms' (on motherhood, childcare, and care labor in urban spaces), 'City of Friends' (on celebrating friendship), 'City of One; (on privacy and being alone in a city), 'City of Protest' (how the ability to engage in protest in a city is informed by gender, race, and class considerations), and 'City of Fear' (how women experience fear, harassment, and assault).

Each chapter is sharp, wise, and expanded my thinking. My favorites were 'City of Friends' and 'City of Protest' particularly insightful. 'City of Friends' is a thrilling affirmation of the power of women's friendships, and touches on the importance of lesbian and queer community spaces as well. Kern writes, "Too often, women's friendships are misunderstood as second-rate substitutions for romantic heterosexual friendships or veiled lesbian love…It seems that culturally we lack a language to adequately describe the character and quality of female friendships." She describes how cities, despite their flaws, are also "providing the environments where women can make and sustain these connections [of friendships], perhaps even over the course of a lifetime", in a way that challenges the norm that a heterosexual romantic partnership is the most important (or only) relationship to structure a life around. And 'City of Protest' celebrates both the political power of cities, and the potential for protest, as well as the ways in which protest norms and behaviors can unintentionally include working-class women, mothers, and many others in how they're structured.

One of the best things about Feminist City is that Leslie Kern always, always brings an intersectional approach to each issue. She frequently references Black and Indigenous scholars (such as fellow geographers Katherine McKittrick and Sarah Hunt, and Indigenous scholar Kim Tallbear). She acknowledges where gentrification can make white, economically privileged women safer at the expense of other women, and where a desire for safety can contribute to carceral feminism. In discussing women's safety on the streets, she acknowledges the vital role Take Back the Night campaigns have played in protesting sexual and domestic violence against women, as well as critiques of where they've failed working class and trans women. In a sharp but necessary challenge to undue nostalgia for an idealized urban past, Kern notes: "James Baldwin wrote about the same neighborhood as Jane Jacobs, where as a queer Black man he was regularly harassed by the police and viewed as a dangerous outsider, rather than part of the delightful diversity of Jacobs's own version of Greenwich Village…we need to set aside the rose-coloured glasses and notice who is missing from that picture of idealized city life."

She is critical, but hopeful—the last chapter, 'City of Possibility', affirms that there is so, so much potential in our cities. "Feminist visions of the city have been here all along…there are examples of both practices and ideals that are being lived right now, all along." And she cites the crucial role of Black Lives Matter and Fight for $15, as urban protest movements that are pushing for a better urban landscape for Black communities and working-class communities. They "ask us to think about new ways to organize paid work, care work, and social relations…They invite solidarity from everyone who wants to feel safe in their homes, on the streets, in the bathroom, at work, and at school. They recognize the intersections of gendered concerns with multiple other systems of privilege and oppression, refusing a feminism where raising the status of privileged white women is the marker of success."

I loved this book. And you might love it too, if you: believe in valuing and celebrating care work; joke about (or sincerely dream of) living in a commune with all your dearest friends someday; want a book on urbanism that isn't all about America, for once! (and includes stories about Toronto, Kigali, Hanoi, and Delhi); believe in women's friendships, urban spaces, and an equitable future for our cities.

Katherine

Disclaimer: This is not a review.

Being slippery as a defence mechanism. Afraid of everything. Dance with their eyeballs. Nothing alike.

Feminist City: A Field Guide

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