Best for:
Urban planners, geographers, feminists. Women who live or desire to live in a city.

In a nutshell:
Feminist Geographer Kern shares her thoughts on on how we can improve urban spaces to the meet the needs of people who aren’t just white men.

Worth quoting:
“The provisions made for ‘bubble dining domes’ while homeless people’s tents were violently dismantled illustrates the stark divide over who we believe should have access to public space.”

“It’s clear that the time has come to decentre the heterosexual, nuclear family in everything from housing design to transportation strategies, neighbourhood planning to urban zoning.”

“Makings cities seem safe for women also tends to make them less safe for other marginalized groups.”

Why I chose it:
My partner and I exchange books for Christmas; this was one of his gifts to me. He knows me well.

Review:
I grew up in the suburbs but pretty immediately made a beeline for cities once I graduated high school. I went to college in Seattle, lived in Los Angeles for a year, move to NYC for graduation school and stayed for seven years, jumped to London, moved BACK to Seattle for another eight years, and am now living in London. While I occasionally dream of living in a tiny village in Scotland, the reality is I think I’ll always need to be living in a city.

But, as author Kern points out, cities aren’t exactly made for me. Now, as a middle-class, assumed-straight, white, thin-ish, able-bodied woman, it’s made more for me that many other women, but still. Cities are built around the needs of white men, and that can make life for the woman have just as much right and claim to experiencing a free and fulfilled life in those blocks frustrating, challenging, and even dangerous.

Kern breaks her book up into six areas to explore: city of men, city of moms, city of friends, city of one, city of protest, and city of fear. The first section serves as the introduction, setting out the main premise that cities have been designed by and for (white) men. From there she discusses each area in turn, focusing on the ways cities either are not welcoming to the subjects (e.g. to moms) or, in the case of the chapter on fear, focusing on how the set-up of cities can contribute to women being unsafe, and the actions women are forced to take to counteract and prevent harm.

As I read books, I write in them (it’s why I tend to not make use of libraries - writing in books is critical to my understanding and absorbing their contents). I was flipping through to write this review, and noticed that I had starred and underlined more in the city of moms chapter, which is odd as I am not a mom. But I have a lot of friends who are moms, and I can see how so much of our cities are not set up in ways to support someone who is caring for (and often carrying) a tiny human.

I appreciate that Kern attempts to take an intersectional view of things. For example, in her chapter on city of fear, she focuses heavily on the reality that many things that some women have been pushing for to make themselves feel safer put other, more marginalized people at risk. An example of this is seeking increased police presence, or the speed with which some women are willing to call the police on people of color - white women might end up feeling safer (though probably aren’t actually any safer), but women who are not white, as well as men of color, are put at an even higher risk. In the city of protest chapter, she also acknowledges how some of her early protest experiences may have been lacking in their understanding of how her demands might negatively impact her trans sister and street-based sex workers.

What a gem of a book. It’s fairly short at under 200 pages, but still manages to pack a ton of insight, research, and examination into those pages without feeling overly academic.

Recommend to a Friend / Keep / Donate it / Toss it:
Recommend to a Friend and Keep ( )

Ciudad feminista es un experimento continuo para vivir de manera diferente, vivir mejor y vivir de manera más justa en un mundo urbano.

Vivimos en la ciudad de los hombres. Nuestros espacios públicos no están diseñados para cuerpos femeninos. Hay poca consideración por las mujeres como madres, trabajadoras o cuidadoras. Las calles urbanas suelen ser un lugar de amenazas más que de comunidad. La gentrificación ha dificultado aún más la vida cotidiana de las mujeres. ¿Cómo sería una metrópoli para mujeres trabajadoras? Una ciudad de amistades más allá de Sex and the City. Un sistema de tránsito que acomode a las madres con cochecitos en el recorrido hacia la escuela. Un espacio público con suficientes baños. Un lugar donde las mujeres puedan caminar sin acoso.

En Ciudad feminista, a través de la historia, la experiencia personal y la cultura popular, Leslie Kern expone lo que está oculto a simple vista: las desigualdades sociales construidas en nuestras ciudades, hogares y vecindarios. Kern ofrece una visión alternativa de la ciudad feminista. Asumiendo el miedo, la maternidad, la amistad, el activismo y las alegrías y peligros de estar sola, Kern traza un mapa de la ciudad desde nuevos puntos de vista, presenta un enfoque feminista interseccional de las historias urbanas y propone que la ciudad es quizás también nuestra mejor esperanza para dar forma a un nuevo futuro urbano. Es hora de desmantelar lo que damos por sentado sobre las ciudades y de preguntarnos cómo podemos construir juntas ciudades más justas, sostenibles y favorables a las mujeres.

Easy to read and brisk, although frustratingly without real solutions to many of the identified problems. It's brief length leaves many ideas underdeveloped but is a useful primer on some areas I was only tangentially aware of. ( )

Feminist City: A Field Guide from Leslie Kern is an informative and interesting look at aspects that would go into trying to create something resembling a city that works for and with all, or at least the vast majority, of people.

While she is calling this a "feminist" city, which I do think is an accurate term, she is not claiming that women's issues and only women's issues should be considered. Since so many conflate feminism with some kind of "only for women" thinking, some may initially think this is about making cities so that they cater specifically to women. That would be an oversimplified misstatement of what is going on here.

Before I go on I want to clear up another misconception the title might create. This is not a plan for some utopian city. This is almost like the result of a long and involved brainstorming session. What have been the biggest problems in the past? When fixes have been tried, what were the effects? What other groups are negatively, or positively, impacted by "solutions" that may only consider women, particularly affluent white women? Because there are interlocking systems of oppression and control, how do we look at all and not place one ahead of the others and think that either the others will fall in line or that we can then attack those problems? Since we can't raze cities and build ideal ones, as if there were even such a thing as an ideal city, what can we do that moves everyone forward rather than moving one group forward and another back? These are the types of questions Kern is pondering and speculating about, and she readily acknowledges that there is no simple "one size fits all" solution.

Kern does not just mention or touch on intersectionality, she incorporates it into each chapter. She often starts from personal experience, which is the experience of a privileged white woman. As she springboards from that experience to a broader group of experiences she uses research as well as anecdotal evidence to illustrate how policies allegedly put in place for the safety of women was actually only for white women (without explicitly saying so) and was done more for the financial and economic gain of the moneyed class. This has resulted in actually making life no safer for those white women but making life considerably less safe for other women and groups in the city. It is in considering all these groups, and make no mistake, none of us belong to just one group even if we highlight specific ones at specific times, that the immense difficulties involved in making change to existing cities becomes evident.

Our physical surroundings, urban, rural, or suburban, play a role in how we feel, how we interact, and the possibilities open to us. When those public surroundings have been designed and built with an eye toward only a small segment of the current population (middle class or up white cis males) then there are always already obstacles in place for every other group to safely live and grow. Making change that incorporates the entire population does more to make life better for everyone, including the group thinking they are losing their privileges, than maintaining the status quo under the disingenuous guise of tradition and status quo.

While we will certainly recognize some of the issues Kern presents, maybe even most of them, our knowledge of them is likely as peripheral issues of other things we have read, studied, and lived. In my WGS past, both as a student and my teaching, many incidents were discussed that would fit nicely in this book, but we rarely spent any time or mental energy considering the role of space beyond the obvious (alleys, bars, and the most dangerous, the home bedroom). This work brings those things that might appear isolated, or at least unconnected, together as a single large issue to consider and work on. This book is, I think, ultimately a call to arms for everyone from planners and architects to politicians and lay people to consider space, constructed space, as a part of the solution. It won't fix everything, we need a lot of work to be done to make more people start seeing each other as actual sentient beings and not only as objects for either financial gain, procreation, or pleasure. These changes need to happen alongside and as a part of overthrowing the rape culture within which we live. And we must consider what affect any action will have on people who might have been peripheral to the initial "problem."

I highly recommend this as long as the reader understands that this is not a blueprint but a bringing together of various aspects of what has to be considered. Each of us might not fully appreciate each issue Kern brings up. That is okay, just don't block out her concerns and understand that even if you or I don't understand it is still an issue, so we are the ones needing to work to better understand so that we can then all work together.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )