Cities and Gender

Helen Jarvis, Jonathan Cloke, Paula Kantor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415415705
• eBook ISBN: 9781134119240
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Men and women experience the city differently: in relation to housing assets, use of transport, relative mobility, spheres of employment and a host of domestic and caring responsibilities. An analysis of urban and gender studies, as co-constitutive subjects, is long overdue.

Cities and Gender is a systematic treatment of urban and gender studies combined. It presents both a feminist critique of mainstream urban policy and planning and a gendered reorientation of key urban social, environmental and city-regional debates. It looks behind the 'headlines' on issues of transport, housing, uneven development, regeneration and social exclusion, for instance, to account for the 'hidden' infrastructure of everyday life. The three main sections on 'Approaching the City', 'Gender and Built Environment' and, finally, 'Representation and Regulation' explore not only the changing environments, working practices and household structures evident in European and North American cities today, but also those of the global south. International case studies alert the reader to stark contrasts in gendered life-chances (differences between north and south as well as inequalities and diversity within these regions) while at the same time highlighting interdependencies which globally thread through the lives of women and men as the result of uneven development.

This book introduces the reader to previously neglected dimensions of gendered critical urban analysis. It sheds light, through competing theories and alternative explanations, on recent transformations of gender roles, state and personal politics and power relations; across intersecting spheres: of home, work, the family, urban settlements and civil society. It takes a household perspective alongside close scrutiny of social networks, gender contracts, welfare regimes and local cultural milieu. In addition to providing the student with a solid conceptual grounding across broad structures of production, consumption and social reproduction, the argument cultivates an interdisciplinary awareness of, and dialogue between, the everyday issues of urban dwellers in affluent and developing world cities. The format of the book means that included with each chapter are key definitions, 'boxed' concepts and case study evidence along with specifically tailored learning activities and further reading. This is both a timely and trenchant discussion that has pertinence for students, scholars and researchers.

Part I
Approaching the City

1 From binaries to intersections

Learning objectives

• to appreciate the systematic intertwining of urban studies and gender studies as co-constitutive subjects
• to begin to recognise the city in ‘ordinary’ terms through an integrated and inter-disciplinary focus on everyday life
• to view urban space and gender identities beyond binary distinctions

Introduction

This chapter introduces the reader to new and different ways of seeing the city from a gender perspective. While we place gender in the foreground as a fundamental site of inequality, we acknowledge along with other feminist scholars that this constitutes just one side of a ‘wicked triangle’ of race, class and gender (Grünell and Saharso 1999). Travelling around the world, towns and cities are encountered which might not immediately appear to be ‘gendered’; yet we argue that they are. The ‘concrete’ sense in which the city is constructed over many hundreds of years and at vast expense tells a different story from more ephemeral manifestations of popular culture such as fashion, television and advertising, for instance. Cities assume a semi-permanent spatial arrangement and material culture, filtered through the psychological architecture of belief systems in a constant state of flux. Over time these cultures sediment in the form of buildings, monuments, political and administrative systems, which in turn come to symbolise and reinforce powerful regulatory norms and stereotypes. A particular challenge for the systematic intertwining of cities and gender, indeed for gender mainstreaming in general, is to prevent gender being defined as ‘women’. Meeting this challenge requires a comprehensive overview of the related disciplines as well as new tools and techniques of urban ethnographic analysis.

First among the skills of urban ethnography that we consider crucial to understanding the gendered nature of cities is standpoint awareness: from whose perspective, with whose voice, are cities and gender and power relations defined? This chapter begins by questioning the tendency for cities to be viewed in binary terms, from a narrow ‘androcentric’ and occidocentric (ethnocentric) standpoint. Then we explore the way that cities and gender are popularly represented, both by the media and in the public imagination (through newspapers, television, film, fiction, monuments and archives), and how these representations shape cultural norms and stereotypes and ways of ‘doing’ masculinity and femininity. This discussion in turn raises awareness of the many manifestations of gender and power at work in the city – beyond/behind the headlines and the picture postcard images which are themselves produced (and consumed) in segregated and exclusive ways. What captures the public imagination may be skewed by sensational journalism but it can also provide a telling insight into the tacit codes by which men and women, boys and girls define their gender and sexual identity in relation to powerful cultural norms. Over the course of this chapter we encourage the reader to differentiate a top-down ‘gaze’ from a grassroots or street-level ‘lived experience’, deploying skills of empathy, close observation and critical engagement.

Moving beyond binaries

An enduring fascination with real and imagined cities is captured in two recurring themes of introductory urban studies texts. The first is the quest for utopia; the vision of the well designed, well governed, ‘good’ or ‘ideal’ city. The second is the unhealthy, deviant or dysfunctional city. Historically the tendency has been to elaborate these themes of utopia and disorder through contrast theory and binary distinctions (see Chapter 2), such as between good and evil, urban and rural, civilised and primitive, modernity and post-modernity, collective and individual. Likewise, when we turn to gender we find persistent reference to a male/female binary defined by biological sex (see Chapter 3).

The first part of this book outlines and then dismantles these separate binaries (of urban studies, gender studies and global north/south). This journey takes us from an essentialised male/female binary of ‘separate spheres’ (public/private, outside/inside, economy/family, work/home, distance/intimacy, duty/love), to an awareness of the intersection of multiple identities, multiple economies and a blurring of space–time boundaries. This reflects the steady way in which urban studies has expanded to recognise the diversity of urban experiences, to the wider range of cities across the world, increasingly emphasising the ‘flows and networks (money and migrants) that pass through cities rather than the territory of the city itself’ (Robinson 2006: 93). In this book we continue this pursuit of a more integrated and nuanced gendered urban analysis, combining the lessons learned from historical developments in these separate disciplines and adding to these the skills of feminist urban ethnography and critical engagement with the similarities and differences of cities and gender encountered in a highly unequal world. Crucial to this integration are a number of ‘bridging concepts’, which we introduce (in boxes) in this and subsequent chapters. First among these bridging concepts is standpoint awareness, which is defined in Box 1.1.

Box 1.1: Standpoint

Significant among the contributions of feminist scholarship is the understanding that students, teachers, academics and members of the public do not gain their knowledge and understanding of the world as a ‘god trick’ ‘as if from nowhere’ (Haraway 1991). What individuals see, hear and believe is necessarily ‘laden’ with personal values, encounters, experiences and expectations; so a young black man growing up on the streets of a poor neighbourhood in Harlem is going to have a different ‘position’ or standpoint on crime, based on relative fear of crime, for instance, compared with a white middle-class mother travelling through that same New York neighbourhood on the subway with her children.

Recognising the existence of multiple ‘lived realities’ rather than a singular ‘objective truth’ alters both the subject and the manner of observation. Thus bell hooks (1982) urged white women to re-examine the female subject in their work, to theorise the complexities of ‘raced’ identities rather than to pronounce on a meaningless category of ‘every woman’ from the privileged experience of ‘white woman’. On the one hand, standpoint awareness can lead to the view that ‘there is nothing about being “female” that naturally binds women’ (Haraway 1991: 155, cited in McDowell 1999: 22). On the other hand, it can be argued that standpoint is entirely compatible with the construction of multiple masculinities and femininities within a powerfully maintained norm of dichotomised male and female heterosexual bodies (Butler 1993, cited in McDowell 1999: 23). Here we largely take the latter view.

We encounter the legacy of binary distinctions in popular definitions of what is urban relative to a sense of the rural. Yet in reality we can identify a large number of settlement types that are neither rural nor urban in the conventional sense (see Chapter 2). We also confront the perennial binary of ‘structure’ versus ‘agency’ which has exercised theoretical debate for a hundred years or more. By highlighting both the mundane and the messy realities of urban daily routines, we seek to dismantle the extreme caricatures of people either as victims of circumstance or exercising full control over their own destiny. Linked to this, we move debates on urban livelihoods beyond the binary that typically defines a formal (cash) economy in opposition to an informal (barter or love) economy. Finally, moving beyond the male/female binary in the remainder of the book, we recognise sex-as-gender to be socially and culturally constructed, reflecting multiple and fluid ways of expressing masculinity and femininity; of ‘doing’ gender rather than ‘being’ essentially born into a fixed identity of boy or girl; as son/daughter, husband/wife, breadwinner/homemaker.

Androcentrism and occidocentrism

The discipline of urban studies which emerged from the late nineteenth century typifies a very narrow standpoint as it was without question a male domain. Not only has writing on the city been largely androcentric (or male conceived), but also it has derived from an occidocentric (or Western conceived) viewpoint that does little justice to the lived realities of men and women in either the global north or the global south. Many scholars argue that it remains so today.

Androcentrism is defined as being centred or focused on men, often to the neglect or exclusion of women.

(American Heritage Dictionary 2000)

Occidocentrism (used synonymously with Eurocentrism) is defined as the projection of Western values (Occident meaning ‘the west’ of Europe, America, or both, as distinct from the Orient) and pervasive or under-examined notions of colonialism in relation to non-Western cultural contexts.

Ethnocentrism is defined as the tendency for the author/observer to view the world from their own cultural standpoint and for them to believe that their own culture is superior to that of other groups.

Androcentric origins are evident not only in terms of who the urban scholars were but also in the subject matter and mode of analysis considered worthy of investigation. This is highlighted with respect to the ‘top 10 ideas of urban studies’ listed in a mainstream teaching text published by Blair Badcock (2002: 5) and distributed across the English-speaking world. Badcock’s list begins in the 1880s with Charles Booth’s survey of working-class living conditions in Victorian London. It then proceeds to emphasise ‘the’ Chicago school of Park, Burgess and McKenzie (1925), Alonso’s (1964) economic modelling of urban land uses, the French architect Le Corbusier’s ‘cities in the sky’ and the writings of Lewis Mumford, David Harvey, Manuel Castells, Mike Davis and William Cronin – all arguably ‘macho’, ‘macro’ grandstand views of the city. The list recognises just two female ‘micro’ (more qualitative) influences, both after the 1960s when the relatively new discipline of women’s studies (later recast as gender studies) began to exert influence at the margins of urban debates by exposing discriminatory assumptions of life in a world ‘made and managed’ by men (Roberts 1991).

While the volume and sophistication of feminist interventions have increased over the intervening years, the puzzle remains that urban studies and gender studies continue to exist as separate disciplines whereby at best they co-exist. Again with few exceptions (but see Greed 1991; Matrix 1984; Roberts 1991), consideration of gender issues remains largely separate and subordinate within urban studies. Similarly, gender studies rarely engages systematically with the built environment (but see WGSG 1997; McDowell 1999; Booth et al. 1996; Domosh and Seager 2001), tending instead to focus on the social relations and economic implications of gender segregation at home and in the workplace. What is missing then is a disciplinary intertwining of cities and gender through the engagement of students and practitioners of urban planning and urban social policy in an integrated theory and practice.

Second among the skills of urban ethnography we wish to cultivate in the course of this book is an appreciation of the empirical richness of everyday life. Much as Jenny Robinson (2006: 1) argues that all cities are best understood as ‘ordinary’ to resist the ethnocentric labelling of certain cities as Western, Third World, Developed, Developing, World or Global (but also see Chapter 5), we argue that urban ethnographic analysis is best conducted through closer scrutiny of the ‘ordinariness’ of everyday life. Recognising the mundane moments of daily life attests to the diversity and complexity of city dwellers – from those who sweep the trading floors to the traders themselves. This is why everyday life is introduced here as another of our bridging concepts. Not only has this concept been similarly mobilised by the separate disciplines of urban studies and gender studies, but it also combines with urban ethnography (and mass observation) in potentially transformative ways. The bridging concept of everyday life is introduced in Box 1.2, while the transformative potential of an explicitly feminist ‘everyday’ is discussed further in Chapter 5.

Box 1.2: Everyday life

As a basic definition, the term ‘everyday life’ refers to those ordinary, taken for granted, habitual thoughts, activities and settings that are close and familiar to all of us but which are rarely measured by governments or scholars or endowed any particular significance. Henri Lefebvre used the metaphor that everyday life is like fertiliser: it functions as a source of life-giving power but it largely goes unnoticed as it is tramped underfoot:

A landscape without flowers or magnificent woods may be depressing for the passer-by but flowers and trees should not make us forget the earth beneath, which has a secret life and a richness of its own.

(Lefebvre 1991: 87)

Henri Lefebvre also famously coined the phrase ‘the familiar is not necessarily known’ to capture the understanding that while an activity such as shopping or walking may be ubiquitous it lacks meaning if it is not recognised – by naming, counting, researching and assigning value (Jarvis 2009).

The concept and language of ‘everyday life’ have their roots in the ‘transformation of intimacy’ or ‘new emotional style’ that infused the social sciences (sociology, psychology, geography, anthropology), stimulated by Freudian psychoanalysis in the 1920s (Giddens 1993; Illouz 2007). Further momentum can be attributed in the 1960s to Erving Goffman’s symbolic interaction and dramaturgical approach elucidated in his seminal 1959 publication The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Illouz (2007) observes that ‘emotional behaviour’ (and face-to-face interaction) has become so central to economic behaviour since this time, especially through the transition from manufacturing to service sector ‘post-industrial’ economic expansion, that popular classifications of emotional intelligence and self-help guides are now deeply embedded in corporate business culture. Notions of ‘emotional competence’ as the ‘ability to monitor one’s own and others’ emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use the information to guide one’s thinking and actions’ were formalised by Daniel Goleman in his 1995 international best-seller Emotional Intelligence (Illouz 2007: 64). Alongside this ‘cultural turn to therapy’ can be observed a second aspect of the ‘modern emotional style’ which locates the relations of the self in a realm dubbed ‘everyday life’ by Stanley Cavell (1996). From this we see a shift in research interest to the ordinary and the mundane.

There are a number of urban social theorists whose work is intimately bound up with conceptions of everyday life. Of particular note are Michel de Certeau (1984), who developed a ‘grammar’ of everyday practice; Henri Lefebvre (1984) and his philosophy of the ordinary; and Dorothy E. Smith (1989), who contributed a feminist understanding of the asymmetry of power between men and women. We expand on the contributions of these scholars in subsequent chapters (for an overview and critique of these key thinkers, see Gardiner 2000). It is important to note that notions of ‘ordinariness’ have been mobilised far more literally by feminist scholars and in household research with the more progressive intention of systematically overhauling, as inclusive and enabling, the material fabric and institutions of the city.

Renewed interest in ‘everyday geographies’ also forms part of a shift in the scale of the analytic lens (from macro to micro) and the favoure...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of boxes
• List of case studies
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• General introduction
• Part I Approaching the City
• Part II Gender and the Built Environment
• Part III Representation and Regulation
• Appendix
• Bibliography