Urban spaces can be embedded with certain values, influencing how inclusive it is to the community it serves. 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.” Imagine walking home; how would you feel if you needed to pass through a dark street or park? How is it to be alone at a bus stop or station? What is it like to change, feed or carry your child if you are a parent in a public space or transport? Kofi Hope, Senior Policy Advisor, Wellesley Institute; Bousfield Distinguished Visitor, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto

And I think at the urban level, there's also been some interesting moments where people were saying, "Get outside, socialize outside, make use of outdoor public space, it's safer," and so on. But many of our cities have not really been well set up to encourage that socializing. So some cities took it upon themselves to do things that, again, they'd been dragging their feet on for a long time. They increased bicycle lanes and pedestrian access. They created more space for socializing in urban public space. They limited car traffic. They created opportunities for other sorts of social engagements, whether that's through outdoor dining or outdoor public activities. So I think it's a moment where we could see perhaps some changes in how we use urban public space. 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 In October 2022 Cllr Holly Bruce's motion passed in the city chambers, committing the council to taking a feminist town planning approach in its decision making. KERN: I think one of the conversations [the pandemic] has sparked is around issues of care work in the home, gender in the workplace, and how those things interrelate together, because in many ways, we are recognizing that despite all of our pretensions to gender equality in the home and workplace, there's still a disproportionate share of care labor that falls on women in the home. And in both Canada and the U.S., many thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of women have lost their jobs. So what's the glimmer of hope in that? Second, her work has long built on a concern with knowledge production, and the need to understand the social positions that allows knowledge production and power. The biggest influence on her thoughts are planners who insist on building objectivity in the planning process through the inclusion of marginal or excluded voices. More recently she had become interested in the spaces of knowledge production and how knowledge has become relevant in particular events. The feminist city could not be built by state planners and international donors even if they had taken the time to consider the views of the oppressed or marginalised. Rather, the feminist city is one in which the oppressed and margin https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/urban-institute/interrogations/urban-humansalised has autonomy to build the city they want. That autonomy may depend on support from powerful interests, but it could not be mediated by them.

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The UK is soon to get its first ever feminist city, but what exactly is that and how does a city become feminist? And the more we can expand that, the more everyone will benefit. And a feminist lens, a gender equity lens, is just one way of opening that up. It's not the only way. And I would never advocate for it to replace other ways of looking at the city. But certainly, if we think about a feminist analysis of care work, for example, you know, who does the, the unpaid and paid labor that keeps human beings alive and cared for and nursed and educated and fed and clean? All of that kind of labor — how is that organized in the city? How could we reshape elements of city spaces to prioritize that care work?

The event also inspired the City of Vienna to make the queer community more visible in public spaces, for example, by including illustrations of same-sex couples in traffic lights. But while much progress has been made for the queer community, Ledinski says there is a potential to do more. "There is always room for improvement, especially when it comes to the recognition of inter and trans people," he said. Embedding inclusivity can also be done once a space is designed and built, through posted rules and signage. For example, during the Pride Toronto Festival, rules are posted to ensure Pride creates a safe space for the LGBTQ2+ community. This embeds the city streets with inclusivity and instructs how people should treat each other. So on the one hand, there’s affordable housing, which to me is one of the absolute cornerstones of any concept of the feminist city. But I’m also thinking about exploding even further the traditional nuclear family home, which remains an assumed norm despite characterizing a minority of households in many cities around the world. The girls' stage joins workout stations, a playground and more than 50 new trees as new additions to the square, which reopened last year following a gender-sensitive redesign. But in Vienna, it's not only the urban spaces that are developed with gender in mind. All aspects of public life, including transportation and language, are impacted by the capital's aim of being an inclusive and gender-neutral destination.

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Work with researchers and citizens and give them the tools to design. In Glasgow, people are creative and can develop ideas about how gender can be incorporated within their areas.” Sorcha McIntyre said about the steps the city needs to adopt to incorporate gender mainstreaming in urban planning. Glasgow Green. 95% of women in Glasgow feel unsafe visiting parks at night. “Glasgow: a feminist city?” YWL report 2021

An intersectional analysis of our urban environments through a combination of personal narrative, theory, and pop culture analysis. Leilah Stone, Metropolis Magazine Read Time:4 Minute, 3 Second Glasgow City Council will officially use gender mainstreaming and an intersectional approach in urban planning. It will design a city that will benefit everyone. What does a feminist approach to urban planning look like? SG: It’s interesting that this question of the home is at the center of your book, even while it’s not explicitly discussed. And this does not just stop with gender. According to Sauer, there has also been a lot of activism and political support for the LGBTQ community. I didn’t know how much I valued that invisibility until it was gone. It didn’t magically reappear after my daughter was born, either. Pregnancy and motherhood made the gendered city visible to me in high definition. I’d rarely been so aware of my embodiment, and the connection between this and my experience of the city became much more visceral. While I’d experienced street harassment and fear, I had little sense of how deep, how systemic, and how geographical it all was.Rape myths, though, are rooted in deeper systems than the physical environment. The question is, what can cities do differently to support women’s independence, equality, and empowerment? Safe and affordable public transit and housing, eliminating the gendered and racialized wage gap, and universal child care would be great places to start. 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 Third, the feminist city is messy and it is alive! It demands a new engagement with its materialities and ecologies. This requires rethinking the relationship with materials and how we care for them. Care is however not a neutral term, not something that can be dispensed at will and that depends on complex material histories. In cities, those histories of care may have allowed for the sedimentation of inequalities and structures of oppression in complex material arrangements of infrastructures and patterns of resource use. A feminist city would put such arrangements into question. Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of USAPP– American Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics. Stairs, revolving doors, turnstiles, no space for strollers, broken elevators and escalators, rude comments, glares: I sheepishly realized that until I faced these barriers, I’d rarely considered the experiences of disabled people or seniors who are even more poorly accommodated. It’s almost as though we’re all presumed to want or need no access to work, public space, or city services. Best to remain in our homes and institutions, where we belong.