Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World

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One of the best things about Feminist City is that Leslie Kern always, always brings an intersectional approach to each issue. Salah satunya adalah dalam hal ruang gerak yang aman, nyaman, dan namun privasi tetap terjaga meski di ruang publik. 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. What is explored here is the ethos of the feminist city rather than what the city itself would look like, and is therefore frustratingly without 'solutions,' both in terms of design and new ideas, which are few and far between the personal anecdotes and how it is woven with observations from existing scholarship in the fields of feminist geography and urban studies.

I am not married, and my vacation times don't usually match with the people who I wouldn't mind traveling with. 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. In turn, cities become the major spheres of inequality and oppression that further shape the ways in which these groups experience public and private life. Leslie Kern's Feminist City is a fine book that doesn't need my 2 cents on it, but here it is anyway.

I especially loved the section on female friendship ,, it was so nice to see it given proper academic value ! The author talks a lot about intersectional identities as well and how it comes to play in navigating spaces. Some of this content overlapped with Caroline Criado-Perez' incredible Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, which I would recommend for a more thorough, all-encompassing perspective.

Women's second-class status is enforced not just through an actual, material geography of exclusion.The extent to which anyone can simply 'be' in an urban space tells a lot about who has power, who feels their right to the city is a natural entitlement, and who will always be considered out of place.

Kern [wants] to envi­sion a more inclu­sive city that con­sid­ers the phys­i­cal and cul­tur­al needs of its most mar­gin­al­ized mem­bers. He has postgraduate degrees in Political Science and European Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago and the London School of Economics and Political Science respectively. 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.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. 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. These findings confirm previous studies exploring the effect of gentrification on queer spaces where gentrification pressures lead to a ‘de-gaying’ effect, resulting in the displacement of certain queer communities with limited socio-economic resources ( Doan and Higgins, 2011; Doan, 2016).

Apakah benar mereka sudah memperhitungkan wanita, LGBTQ, penduduk kulit berwarna ke dalam hitungan mereka dalam mendesain sesuatu? The book is filled with an enormous sense of entitlement and self-righteousness – the author projects her experiences and feelings onto every woman, and, by contrast, alleges that men need to have opposite experiences and feelings by default.Despite some progress, women, disabled people, people of colour, gender and sexual minorities, immigrants as well as Indigenous communities are still being marginalised and excluded from decision- and policymaking processes. But it's a rather condescending approach – she admits that women poorer than her might feel differently, but if a woman has means to go to a restaurant, she must feel as threatened there as Kern does. 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. This suggests that forging alliances across communities, activism, and collective action represent the drivers to realize the aspiration of feminist cities. She frequently references Black and Indigenous scholars (such as fellow geographers Katherine McKittrick and Sarah Hunt, and Indigenous scholar Kim Tallbear).