Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World

Description

What should 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. 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. She 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.

Leslie Kern is an Associate Professor of geography and environment and Director of women's and gender studies at Mount Allison University. She is the author of Sex and the Revitalized City.

This original study of the gendering processes occurring in the neoliberal city is a significant addition to scholarly debate on cities and gender. Empirically grounded in the intricacies of the condo market in Toronto, it both adds to, and updates, the pathbreaking work around gendered critical urban analysis. An accessible and incisive text that will no doubt instigate future discussions -- Loretta Lees, Cities Group, Department of Geography, King's College, London * [for Sex and the Revitalised City] * Cities aren't built to accommodate female bodies, female needs, female desires. In this rich, engaging book the feminist geographer Leslie Kern envisions how we might transform the "city of men" into a city for everyone. Let's all move there immediately.' Lauren Elkin, author of Flaneuse -- Lauren Elkin, author of Flaneuse [An] insightful scholarly work ... This provocative analysis will resonate with theoretically minded feminists. * Publishers Weekly * An optimistic, pragmatic book, which points to already extant solutions and looks forward to a more just, joyous urban future. -- Stephanie Sy-Quia * Tribune * Kern resists drawing a blueprint for a new master-planned feminist city. Instead, she believes we ought to take a closer look at how cities perpetuate inequality from the perspective of race, gender, ability, and class. -- Diana Budds * Curbed * An intersectional analysis of our urban environments through a combination of personal narrative, theory, and pop culture analysis. -- Leilah Stone * Metropolis Magazine * [Feminist City] examines the city's paradoxical ability to oppress and emancipate-how an environment teeming with gendered inconvenience, racial discrimination, and sexual violence can also be a locus of queer independence, community care, and emancipatory feminist world-making. ... Heavily researched but accessibly written, the book is a dynamic mix of high and low, facts and feelings, research and reality. * Hazlitt * Kern delves into the interlocking inequalities and systems of oppression that take concrete shape in cities, using an intersectional feminist approach to explore the gendered aspects of urban space...an enjoyable and accessible book that not only contributes to urban feminist geography, but to urban planning and policy more broadly * LSE Review of Books * [Feminist City is] a small but provocative book. It is both an introduction to feminist geography and to modern feminism, with its multiple meanings and numerous contradictions. ... In a world where the male gaze is so often the only gaze considered, so much so [that] most people don't even think of it as being gendered in any way, Feminist City is revelatory. -- Ron Jacobs * CounterPunch * Looking through the lens of geography, pop culture and public and personal history, the book exposes how female bodies are ostracised in urban spaces. * Refinery29 * There should be more books like this...Feminist City is wide-ranging and sophisticated, brief and engaging. * ICON Magazine * Kern [wants] to envi sion a more inclu sive city that con sid ers the phys i cal and cul tur al needs of its most mar gin al ized mem bers. -- Apoorva Tadepalli * In These Times * [Kern] introduces readers to a number of different ways the city is at once emancipatory and endangering. She deploys an intersectional lens to explore such themes as mobility, protest, adolescence, and friendship, weaving together an impressive array of sources from academic writings and popular culture (Doreen Massey appears alongside Two Dope Queens). -- Sophie Gonick * Public Books *