NOTES ON THE FEMINIST CITY (ROADMAP)

I'm thinking right now a lot about what could be called "the feminist city," which is a term that from what I can tell isn't used all that much in current planning literature. We get discussion of the "just city," or the Right to the City, or how gender plays such a fundamental role in the production of public and private space, and there are certainly feminist critiques of cities and of the urban planning profession in general, but all of this doesn't seem to triangulate very often into a putting forth of normative visions of what a feminist city would or should be. Obviously, Dolores Hayden's essay speculating on the "non-sexist city" continues to capture plenty of people's imaginations (mine included), but I find myself wishing 30+ years after that essay was published that every city or planning department had some kind of institute on the feminist city that would expand and extend the vision that Hayden lays out. (I think that plenty of feminists out there can voice the same lament for many never-realized feminist projects.)

Anyway, this isn't the beginnings of a rant, but rather the beginning of laying out a roadmap for myself in finding strong theory and strong practices that can come together in a "unified" vision of the feminist city. I put unified in quotations for what are probably obvious reasons--one being, namely, that I don't think a unified theory of anything is all that possible given how complex and changing the, well, universe happens to be. I'm not attempting to lay out a utopian vision that I actually think should be implemented, whether top-down or bottom-up or something in between. Still, as many have pointed out, it can be intellectually useful to engage in quasi-utopian thinking, because the by-products of the process can be workable ideas and tactics.

So with that in mind, I'm going to lay out a tentative, rough sketch of what would need to be addressed in order to bring a feminist city into being. I guess this is sort of the groundwork for quasi-utopian thinking. It should go without saying that gender oppression is intimately tied up with multiple other oppressions (race/class/sexuality/everything), and therefore pulling on the gender string is going to bring all sorts of intersectionality with it. But still, in creating a vision for the just city through a gender/feminist lens, there are the various areas of exploration that first strike me as needing to be addressed, and to do that I'm setting about on the process of reading and drawing together both theoretical and practical works on these topics. Here are a few that seem important to tackle:

Hayden mentions:

• housing,
  
• urban design,
  
• and human work,

which are all vital parts of the picture. Hayden's essay and her larger works like Redesigning the American Dream cover a lot of ground on these topics. There's an established literature of feminist critiques of the design of homes, i.e., the ways that homes are built with assumptions that reflect a patriarchal gender order and in turn serve to help maintain that order once they're being lived in. I need to tackle more of this work, but it's nice to know it's there. And this in turn extends to the "public" spheres of urban design and labor, with cities having been designed and labor having been set up under assumptions that privilege a patriarchal order, that provide men, on the whole, with certain advantages.

The place where I sometimes see a gap is in the discussion of the public spaces and the spatial practices that go on within them. There's excellent theoretical work on public space, ranging from work on the right to the city (the right both to inhabit and to shape) and how space is produced and reproduced in that difficult-to-read Henri Lefebvre kind of way, and that involves analysis of how everyday social practices, social practices that occur within and are intimately tied to the identity of spaces, (re)produce a gender order. There's a more practical realm, too--sometimes one of analysis, sometimes one that's just a record of "doing"--that exists as well, one that can be associated with writing on feminist blogs and projects like the Hollabacks in various cities, which both catalog those everyday practices (which fall in large part under the heading of street harassment) and discuss/debate/create responses that undermine this street harassment with different kinds of spatial practices. It seems to me, though, that there's been a gap between the theoretical/historical and the practical tactics of the present day, and that a thorough exploration of both these realms would be of mutual benefit to both.

This is, I guess, a long-winded way of saying that I think street harassment (gender policing of the public realm) is an urban planning issue and hasn't been entirely understood as such. It's been addressed by urban designers, often with an overtone of physical determinism, like we can design our way out of rape culture, but an integration of analysis and/or redesign of the built environment with feminist spatial practices (by groups and/or individuals) seems like something that there could be more of.

We can't forget either the role that written law and policy, and the interpretations of this law by those instilled with the power of legal enforcement, has in all of this, but for now I find myself running a bit out of steam. What I will say is that there's a network of areas available for study here--the way the built environment, in terms of private living spaces and their integration into a larger public realm, helps reinforce gender spatial practices; the way oppositional groups have intervened to alter these spatial practices; the way that oppositional groups could collaborate with designers of the built environment to effect change in everyday lived experience; the way that groups and individuals can create effective new organizations and structures that reinforce a feminist form of the built environment and feminist spatial practices. All of this is immensely complex, yes, but I think the underlying project here is an attempt to draw together existing analytical work and existing practical tactics to sharpen both sides of that theoretical/practical equation.