Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World

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Because, while the city is a place of opportunity and liberation - offering a range of employment types, exposure to diverse cultural experiences and education - it is unequally accessible depending on categories of gender, race, class and physical ability.

I do wish that in her chapter about young girls in the city, she had relied on more than simply movies and personal experience. Kern is an associate professor of geography and environment and the director of women’s and gender studies at Mount Allison University, Canada. 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. An optimistic, pragmatic book, which points to already extant solutions and looks forward to a more just, joyous urban future. One might think that white men are a homogenous group of rich and privileged, moreover, no woman ever has got a degree in architecture and if she, by a miraculous chance, did, then she always resisted the pressure from the system.In The Feminist City, 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. With Feminist City Kern suggests a two-word manifesto: looking at cities from a feminist perspective helps to recognize who is being marginalized and to understand how space structures systems of oppression due to gender but also ethnicity, class, ability, and sexuality.

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. Nevertheless, Feminist City has the merit of initiating questions about what equality means for cities, using a gender perspective to open up a wider, intersectional discourse. In the chapter on protest this came to a head, as Kern more often than not emphasized that challenges of protesting have made it difficult for her to participate in them, whether for reasons of international travel, motherhood, or logistical concerns.Additionally, it's poorly organized, does not stay on topic, and frequently flits about to other issues. Firstly, Kern’s analysis of gentrification in relation to women’s experiences deserves closer attention. There's a lot about this book that is fascinating and seeing the dots being connected just continues to show how strongly patriarchal values are embedded in our system. Otherwise, there is just very little in this at all for anyone who actually knows what it's like to be a woman in a city.