led to a radical shift in how feminism understood the relationships among various systems of privilege and oppression including sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, and ableism.
Feminist geographers faced especially rocky terrain in a discipline steeped in a history of exploration, imperialism, and discovery. The masculine, colonial tropes of intrepid explorers mapping the “new world” still ripple through the field of geography. Urban geographers seek out the next interesting neighbourhood to study and social group to classify, while planners aspire to heights of technical, rational, and objective decision-making about how people should live in cities. Feminist urban scholars pushed to have women recognized as valid and in some ways distinct urban subjects. But their early work lacked an intersectional analysis of how gender relations interlocked with race, class, sexuality, and ability.
Retracing the trajectory taken by academic feminism across many disciplines, feminist geographers often drew on their own experiences to explore how gender interlocked with other social inequalities and the role that space played in structuring systems of oppression. The early work of Gill Valentine, for example, investigated women’s fear of violence in public spaces but quickly evolved to examine lesbian experiences of everyday spaces, such as the street. Valentine faced years of professional harassment for her lesbian identity, yet work such as hers paved the way for sub-fields such as geographies of sexuality, lesbian geographies, and queer and trans geographies. Laura Pulido and Audrey Kobayashi drew on their experiences as women of colour in the discipline to call out geography’s whiteness and push feminists to examine the implicit whiteness behind their research topics and conceptual frameworks. Today, the work of scholars like Black feminist geographer Katherine McKittrick and Indigenous feminist geographer Sarah Hunt continues to challenge lingering anti-Black and colonial attitudes that reappear in feminist and critical urban geographies through our discourses, methods, and choice of research spaces.28
For me, to take a feminist stance on cities is to wrestle with a set of entangled power relationships. Asking “women’s questions” about the city means asking about so much more than gender. I have to ask how my desire for safety might lead to increased policing of communities of colour. I have to ask how my need for stroller access can work in solidarity with the needs of disabled people and seniors. I have to ask how my desire to “claim” urban space for women could perpetuate colonial practices and discourses that harm the efforts of Indigenous people to reclaim lands taken and colonized. Asking these kinds of questions requires an intersectional approach and some level of self-reflection on my own position.
Starting from my own body and my own experiences means starting from a pretty privileged space. As a white, cis, able-bodied woman I know that in most cases, I have the right kind of body for moving through the post-industrial, leisure, and consumption-oriented modern city. I speak English in an English-dominated country. I have formal citizenship in two nation-states. My settler status on Indigenous land is rarely questioned. I’m not Christian but being Jewish is unremarkable in Canada and not visible to most, although a resurgence of anti-Semitic rhetoric and violence makes me type that with a sense of increased wariness. In general, as someone who writes about gentrification for a living, I’m very aware that my body reads as a marker of successful “renewal,” signifying that a space is respectable, safe, middle-class, and desirable.
My body might also signify danger or exclusion for people of colour, Black people, trans folks, disabled people, Indigenous people, and others for whom spaces dominated by whiteness and normative bodies are not welcoming. My presence could suggest that a petty complaint to the manager or a life-threatening phone call to the police is a moment away. My comfort will likely be prioritized over their safety by those around me and by the city in general. While I can’t change most of the features that mark me in these ways, I can be aware of what my body signifies and check the impulse to assert that I can and should claim all urban spaces for my own. If my presence is going to lead to the further marginalization of already-struggling groups, then I need to strongly consider whether my presence there is necessary.
This embodied privilege doesn’t negate gendered fears and exclusions in my life. Rather, the privileges that I hold intersect with and inform my experiences as a woman. Throughout the book, I try to be transparent about what my partial perspective offers, and what it obscures. Working with the commitment to understand that all knowledge is situated—i.e., all knowledge comes from some-where—requires me to acknowledge that even where I am (or was) an “insider,” for example, in my hometown of Toronto, my perspective isn’t definitive.29 For many other cities that I write about, I’m an outsider, which means I must guard against reproducing sloppy stereotypes or problematic images of urban communities to which I don’t belong. I also have to be explicit about the fact that my urban experiences and my geographic expertise are rooted in global north cities and western bodies of research. While I’ve sought out relevant examples and case studies from a wider range of places, I’m not able to do justice to “women’s questions” arising from global south and Asian cities. This gulf is a persistent problem in feminist urban geography, one that many have identified as a key challenge for twenty-first century scholars.30
If you’ve flipped through to my author’s bio, you’ll have noted, maybe with some puzzlement, that I work at a small university in the territory of Mi’kma’ki in what’s currently known as eastern Canada. While we have indie cafés, a hipster bar, and even a gluten-free bakery, Sackville, New Brunswick is a rural town of around five thousand people. It sits about forty kilometres from the nearest city, Moncton, whose population would easily fit inside one London borough. Not exactly an urban hotspot. The pigeons that have set up camp on my office roof are the most urban element of my day. They scribble and scrabble their way across the slanted ceiling, cooing and fighting. The university is trying to get rid of them, but obviously I root for them to avoid their executioners.
I’ve lived here for ten years. When I was first offered a nine-month contract, I nearly turned it down after realizing how tiny Sackville was. “I can’t live there,” I thought. “I’ll turn it down tomorrow.” That’s how bound up the city was with my personal identity. After a restless night, though, I realized that as much as I loved Toronto, full-time employment wasn’t to be rejected. One contract stretched into three and finally a tenure-track appointment and tenure. Ten years. Long enough that I can no longer consider it a temporary relocation from Toronto. But I remain an urban geographer and a city lover.
Where to begin? Begin with the material. The matter of the body. Adrienne Rich lists the particularities of her body—scars, pregnancies, arthritis, white skin, no rapes, no abortions—as a reminder of how her body keeps her grounded in her own perspective, of what it allows her to write and speak. What does my body allow me to write and speak? I could begin with my once-pregnant body, sweating and nauseated on a north London train. I could begin with my tired shoulders, aching from forcing a stroller through ice-choked Toronto streets. I could begin with my feet, slipping gratefully out of my hot shoes and into the cool grass of High Park, where I lie back and people watch. This meeting point of bodies and cities is at the heart of “asking women’s questions” and thinking about the “feminist city.”
These questions ultimately have to help us imagine and enact different urban futures. Inequality, violence, and deprivation still plague cities around the world. Dangerous nationalist movements are finding expression in acts of white terrorism that target diverse urban communities. Climate change is bringing serious challenges to questions of where and how we live. And the effects of all of these issues are very much intertwined. Although large-scale changes at both individual and societal levels are required, we needn’t invent universalizing grand visions or utopian schemes in order to start making things different, better. Alternative visions already exist, both in design and in practice. From schemes to make public transportation safer for women to visions of police and prison abolition, activists, scholars, and everyday folks have long dreamed and theorized and practiced different ways of being together in cities. In fact, we all have the capacity to make new urban worlds—feminist urban worlds—even if those worlds only last a moment, or only exist in one little
