LESLIE KERN: I love cities. I loved living in a city. I loved going to school in a city. I loved my urban life. But I was aware at different points in my life as a woman that there were elements of city life that could be threatening, that could be hostile, that could be incredibly inconvenient. And that that had something to do with my gender. And that prompted me down a particular academic path. But for this book, yeah, I really wanted to kind of start from this place of: Okay, you know, the city has a lot to offer women, and women have been drawn to city life for centuries, but what is it about it that creates these kinds of tensions—this kind of back and forth between freedom and fear, empowerment and struggle? And in order to kind of get at some of those tensions, I think incorporating elements of memoir, storytelling, personal experience, popular culture, fiction, and television, as well as more academic literature that analyzes space in particular ways, were important to me as a kind of entry point. So from the body in many cases. What does our embodied experience of moving through the city, living in the city, prompt us to ask about why things are the way they are?
I’m Leslie Kern, and I’m a professor of geography and environment and women’s and gender studies at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada. And I’m the author of Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World.
When we think about the growth of what we might call modern cities—so Industrial Revolution and afterwards, at least in the West and the Global North—we see a time when a lot of boundaries and social norms were being literally shaken up by the kind of inevitable mixing of people across things like social class in these rapidly expanding urban environments, where things were changing kind of day to day, week to week, in ways that were quite destabilizing to the sorts of social norms that kind of upheld the various distinctions, for example, between classes, and upheld moral status for different groups of people. So when we think about, Why were women kind of perceived as a threat in this environment? Well, first of all, the environment was sort of perceived as a threat to women or to particular groups of women whose social status might be called into question if they were mixing with the wrong sorts of people or in the wrong kinds of places in town. So there was this kind of need for protection. But at the same time, women in various ways were kind of breaking out of those social norms. The city allowed a greater potential degree of freedom for meeting different sorts of people, doing different activities, for paid employment. So a lot of what we see written about cities at that time, and these sorts of fears about a general breakdown of society, were kind of layered onto, well, What’s going to happen to womanhood? What’s going to happen to women’s purity? What’s going to happen to women’s status in the city? So women kind of became, like, a touch stone for whether or not cities were going to be a threat to civilization as we knew it.
When we think about questions around power and inequality, we are often drawn towards looking at how power is reproduced through certain kinds of institutions. So we might look at, like, educational institutions; we might look at political structures of power; or we might look at the legal system as an example of how some groups are accorded more status and power, and others are denied that through discrimination. Geography is one more element that we can look at. So we can also start to understand how power is spatialized. So how do people experience, for example, illegal discrimination? While they might experience it in terms of, where am I allowed to go? Where am I safe or not safe? Where do I belong? Where do I not belong? And that is also a really interesting way to kind of get at, as I say, kind of everyday experience. So not just a sort of abstract functioning of power, but how it really touches down in our everyday lives and can affect everything we do from the minute we wake up in the morning until when, and maybe where, we go to bed at night.
For me in writing a book about the feminist city, about gender in cities, I definitely couldn’t ignore gentrification. It’s what I study and write about and teach about as kind of part of my academic day job. We understand it as a process of class change, and that’s absolutely essential. But there are other factors that are also both driving the process and exist as outcomes of the process. And for me, looking at gender is an important one. So a majority of public housing residents are women and particularly single mothers. So when you demolish public housing or you convert it to mixed and market housing, it’s going to have a disproportionate effect on women. When I was doing my doctoral research, I was looking at condominiums in the city of Toronto, this big explosion of condo building. And there was all of this media rhetoric about, “Oh, condos are gonna be so great for women. This is like a Sex in the City on overdrive.” And I wanted to find out, what was this kind of all about? A lot of it had to do with condos as being this kind of safe, protected environment for women that would somehow allow them to take advantage of a very particular aspect of city life.
So when we look at gentrification and class change, we also have to think about things like gender. We also have to think about race, and how gentrification often involves a kind of whitening of neighborhoods along with class change. And it’s not just a side effect, but it is in part part of what propels gentrification—a kind of whitening plus middle-class make-over of urban space that can have really detrimental effects on communities of color, including heightened experiences of violence from the police and the state in general, as this restructuring takes place. So for me, gentrification is one sort of major vector of how inequality plays out in cities. But I also want to pay attention to the gender dimensions of it, how women are both affected negatively by gentrification and how at times women can also be drivers of gentrification processes.
Writing a book that incorporates my own experience is, I think, a good entry point. But at the same time, I have experienced a lot of privilege in the societies that I live in, in cities that I’ve lived in, based on white skin, being able-bodied, cis-gender, and, you know, more or less middle class throughout most of my life. So there are many ways in which cities are already set up to make me feel pretty comfortable. And a lot of the interventions that might happen in cities might be directed towards my comfort and safety. And if I’m not attentive to an intersectional analysis, I could have written a book that was very much a kind of white feminist manifesto for how we remake the city. And maybe that would look like We need more police! We need more surveillance! We need cleaner neighborhoods! without thinking about how those kinds of policies have long been and continue to be very dangerous and threatening to all sorts of communities, including communities of women or that women make up a great majority of—thinking, for example, of sex workers, for instance, who are often some of the first people who are pushed out in a process of trying to make a part of the city seem safer and more comfortable for another group of women. I’m sure that I’ve dropped the ball at different places in the book, but I hope that I’ve left enough space that other people might feel willing to say, “No, it’s more like this. Or you missed out on this aspect of it.” And not read it as a universalizing manifesto.
I definitely wanted to leave a sense of openness and also hopefulness, because there are definitely a lot of things that one might look at in the book or that one might start to recognize in your own sort of personal experience of the city and say, "Oh my goodness, how are we ever going to change this?" And so there’s a couple of sort of avenues there. One is to think about, well, what examples can you find in your communities of people creating little pockets of feminist city that already exists, that are already part of how we are caring for one another, how we’re reaching for justice in the city? Another avenue is to kind of remind people that we don’t have to take the spaces around us for granted. It’s not just the air that we breathe or the water that we swim in, but that our built environments are human made. And that means that they can be changed and altered and that we can change the perspectives from which they’re designed and built. What if we started from the perspective of a disabled person? What if we started from the perspective of queer youth? You know, what different sorts of interventions would we imagine? So I think leaving that space open, again, is not to be definitive or prescriptive about what a feminist city is, but to leave space for imagining, Well, what if I, or people like me, were the grounds for designing the spaces around us? What could we imagine then?
