Rethinking Feminist Interventions into the Urban

Linda Peake, Martina Rieker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136743511
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Stadtplanung & Landschaftsgestaltung

In Rethinking Feminist Interventions into the Urban, Linda Peake and Martina Rieker embark on an ambitious project to explore the extent to which a feminist re-imagining of the twenty-first century city can form the core of a new emerging analytic of women and the neoliberal urban.

In a world in which the majority of the population now live in urban centres, they take as their starting point the need to examine the production of knowledge about the city through the problematic divide of the global north and south, asking what might a feminist intervention, a position itself fraught with possibilities and problems, into this dominant geographical imaginary look like. Providing a meaningful discussion of the ways in which feminism, gender and women have been understood in relation to the city and urban studies, they ask probing and insightful questions that indicate new directions for theory and research, illustrating the necessity of a re-formulation of the north-south divide as a critical and urgent project for feminist urban studies.

Working through platforms as diverse as policy formulations and telling stories, the contributors to the book come from a range of disciplinary backgrounds and geographic locations ranging through the Caribbean, North America, Western Europe, South, East and South East Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. They identify a range of issues (such as care, work, violence, the household, mobility, intimacy and poverty) that they analytically address to make sense of and reanimate resistance to the contemporary urban through articulations of new grammars of gendered geographies of justice.

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Rethinking Feminist Interventions into the Urban

Linda Peake and Martina Rieker

Feminist urban studies has been generated through a hierarchical ordering, tending to be strongly bifurcated by those scholars who study issues pertaining to cities in the “global south” and those who focus their attention on the urban “global north”, formulating an urban geographical imaginary of discrete and autonomous spatialities, which in turn justifies the lack of any communication between them (Peake 2009). In this respect, and regardless of their field, disciplinary or otherwise,¹ feminist urban studies have mimicked the field of urban studies, itself an unwieldy and mercurial terrain, that as Jennifer Robinson (2006) has pointed out has nevertheless a tendency to characterise cities of the global north as crucibles of modernism, and hence sites for engagement with critical theory, rendering cities in the global south as objects in need of development, representations of which emphasise poverty, culture and tradition and their populations as lacking or passive. Although there is a diversity in intellectual histories and political positions among feminist urban scholars the hegemonic nature of these representations of northern modernity and southern developmentalism (Escobar 1995), and their pervasiveness in travelling globally, speaks to their continued influence on feminist theoretical framings and analytical studies of urban places and their inhabitants.²

Our concern in this introductory chapter is with this hierarchical epistemological legacy of modernity and developmentalism, with its roots in colonial and post-colonial intellectual histories and geographical imaginaries. It prompts our critique – that feminist urban studies is haunted by this legacy, undisturbed for so long that its reflected surface appears unfathomable and has taken on a solid appearance of being “natural” – and defines its urgency. But there is nothing natural about the production of a divided body of work that speaks not to any sense of commonalities or relationships but rather reifies notions of difference, which in the contemporary period are being heightened as “markers of specific forms of cultural – and even civilisational – belonging” (Braidotti 2005: 169). Hence we seek to initiate a conversation about how we produce and analyse feminist knowledge about the urban and women. We take women as a point of departure through which broader social issues of family, community and livelihoods are addressed through their relations with men, youth and children, whose work in these neo-liberal times is still most commonly the foundation of the economy, the community and the family, and whose embodiment can only be read through the lenses of gender, race, class and other social categories and their hierarchical relations. In other words, women are an important node in the constellations of power, and thus in the production of centres and margins, in imaginaries of the urban.³

Given the so-called spatial turn in the social sciences over the past three decades and the (albeit belated) attention now being given to gendered inflections of the urban, we argue that this critical conversation is imperative for a number of reasons. The “twenty-first century of the city” announced by a plethora of policy-making bodies over the past decade imbricates the social and the gendered subject into neo-liberal discourses about the city in new ways. A critical engagement with these relationships thus is imperative for scholarship that seeks to intervene in hegemonic meaning-making practices. Furthermore, the addition of women, and the nomenclature of feminism, especially with the emergence of “governance feminism” (Halley 2006) to the study of cities demands a critical positioning vis-à-vis the making visible of gendered geographies in the contemporary urban, not least in relation to violence, poverty and social justice. Finally, writing at a moment when the neo-liberal project seems to be in its final moments of legitimacy, it is nonetheless incumbent to understand how urban narratives of accumulation and dispossession have been inscribed in the geographical and cultural containers of global north and south (Harvey 2005). Hence, while cognisant of the complex relationships that produced the post-colonial language of global north and global south we find it useful, as heuristic and imbricated as this geographical imaginary is, to work with these terms both to revisit certain historical moments in the field of urban studies and to trace the difficulties of the project of decolonisation (Mattison 2012). And while this chapter cannot serve to give any comprehensive genealogical overview of this imaginary we offer it as an incitement to those who also recognise the urgency of feminist questionings of the urban in this “twenty-first century of the city”.

Urban feminist research: “geographies” of knowledge production

It is to the neo-liberal production of geographical difference that we first turn our attention. While neo-liberalism globally has its local articulations that require their own historical genealogies (Ong 2006), as a dominant sensibility, its various interlocutors, be they states or civil society institutions, are driven by the overriding logic of the pursuit of economic growth. With the consolidation of neo-liberalism in the 1980s its most distinct feature has thus been the concealing of the political and social behind the economic forces of the market, presenting what Bourdieu (1988) termed “the pure and perfect order”. This concealment, often referred to as the purported end of history (Žižek 2009), via processes of market-oriented regulatory restructuring (Brenner, Peck and Theodore 2010), has led to an increasing concentration of power in a narrow capitalist class and the growth of new global financial regulatory frameworks, which have effectively absorbed any imagination and possibilities of change outside these very structures. Moreover, these global regulatory infrastructures, set up to create “the world we want” (United Nations 2000a), have translated ongoing problems as those of geographical scale, variously termed non-compliance to regulatory frameworks already in place, or the product of failed states, culture and so forth.

It is within this neo-liberal rescripting that earlier development discourse has been reiterated (Watts 2010). Developmentalism posits development as a normative position to which states, characterised by poverty, should aspire. As such it pertains to countries variously labelled at specific historical moments as the developing world, the Third World, the post-colonial world and more recently, the global south. While acknowledging it is a term that has been variously interpreted, our concern is with developmentalism as an institutionalised social imaginary based on raising post-colonial states out of poverty (Escobar 1995), that has resulted under neo-liberalism in the production of normalised development subjects, the regulation of knowledge into economics and planning disciplines, and the moralisation of poverty (Watts 2010).

Neo-liberal developmentalism can be understood then as a form of rule, implying forms of expertise, of subjectivity and of identity (Watts 2010) in which new technologies of targets, outcomes monitoring and accountabilities produce a particular kind of indirect spatiality. Individuated subjects (outside articulated notions of the social) constitute the new grammar of sense-making in neo-liberal times. The responsibility for the self (as through micro-credit) and the individual as consumer, undergird specific institutional and political urban contexts, while regulatory frameworks, distinguished by the growth of finance capital and market liberalisation, have resulted in a growing separation of societal needs and democratic politics. These processes have been actualised at the urban scale through varied and complex transformations of urbanisms, resulting in a range of new urban spatialities. Notwithstanding that contemporary urban life is shaped by neo-liberalism, as a practice it is also shaped by those that challenge it through a range of alternative imaginaries and practices of participation, self-reliance, autonomy, diversity, subaltern communities and knowledges, difference and specificities (Zibechi 2010; de Sousa Santos and Rodríguez-Garavito 2005) As Leitner et al. (2007: 11) make clear, contestations to neo-liberal projects often exceed them, are not always a direct response to them, may take forms that preceded their advent, and may take place where they are weak. Neo-liberalism is thus always interwoven with other projects, whose spatialities may range through “localised initiatives, but also interurban, local–global, north–south, and urban–rural connectivities”, always and already calling into question urban-based research cordoned by national and regional boundaries.

Indeed, interventions questioning the “geographical” production of knowledge about cities, based on the hegemonic opposition between northern modernity and southern developmentalism, have been attempted. A detailed genealogy of such disruptions might point to a body of work on North African urbanism that sought to challenge this hegemonic telling of the story of the modern city by pointing towards ways in which North African urban projects were laboratories for the making of modern European cities (Rabinow 1995; Çelik 1997). Indeed, a rich literature attests to the city as a specific disciplinary site for the making of modern citizens (cf Ghannam 2002), rendering practices of resistance as rural, subaltern, in other words, non-modern (Chakrabarty 2002). Modernity’s imperial sensibilities to name that which it cannot remake as “traditional” or “anti-modern” thus constitutes a significant grammar concealing the power relations that go into our understanding of the modern city, especially colonially mediated modernity projects in the colonial and post-colonial periods. One could also point towards ways in which certain urban forms (for example, the favela, the gated-community) became regional tool-kits of analysis that were subsequently globalised (Roy and AlSayyad 2004). However, these circulations have remained on a formal technical level without necessarily influencing the theorisation of northern cities. The question that concerns us here is why these and other current modes of intervention – including disciplinary engagements with the urban as well as post-colonial (Edensor and Jayne 2012; Robinson 2006), citizenship (Isin 2002), and political economy (Blaut 1993: Leitner et al. 2007) critiques, of this hierarchical divide – have as yet been unable to effectively challenge the dominant urban modern.

Moreover, although gendered imaginaries – both feminist and not – have entered into these debates in significant ways there have been no systematic efforts by urban feminist scholars to add to them to ensure that a theoretical engagement with gender relations and an empirical concern with women’s everyday lives are undertaken, not in separate spheres of north and south but in productive engagement with each other, within an analytical register that articulates these subjects as marked both by “differences” in global, epistemic and material positioning and through global structures that render them mutually constitutive. And thus scholarship that explicitly focuses on the life-worlds of women among the urban working poor, for example, remains by and large grounded within the problematic theoretical framings of the hegemonic late nineteenth and early twentieth century theories of modern urban life which posited urban socialities in a space of densely populated but impersonal cities compared with socially knit rural communities. Another large body of work of the urban south differed predominantly, however, in its conceptualisation of urban arenas as replete with community life and dense social networks alongside that which understood it in terms of problems of rural encroachment on an incomplete modern urban project (Bayat and Denis 2000). Since the development of neo-liberal capitalist economies, and their impact on urban life, these theoretical scaffolds have increasingly come under critical scrutiny in terms of providing a viable analytic frame to understand changes in spaces we call urban. However, questions of neo-liberal regulatory frameworks, modes of transactions and livelihood strategies outside capital are rarely brought into a critical analytic frame concerning choices women make to survive in the city.⁴

What are the consequences then for urban scholarship of invoking our critique, of undercutting the current binary framing studies of “women and cities”, thereby unsettling the urban north as the site of modernity and lifting studies of women in the urban south out of a developmentalist frame? In her influential work Saskia Sassen (2002) has challenged the sense-making capabilities of analytic frameworks that seek to understand urban processes in mega-cities within specific national grids; in focusing on cities as financial hubs she challenges the very production of the global north and south, rendering these divides fictive as best. The question begs itself why feminist scholars by and large have eschewed this challenge. Why do the spatial registers of nation (emblematic of second-wave feminism) and of the global south and north continue to play the roles they do in urban research? Why does the bulk of academic work on women in the global south remain committed to the deeply ethnographic frame, rarely theorising its interventions within an urban geography frame? And why does feminist theorising from the north not engage with the rich theoretical literature from the south? For as Ferguson (2006) reminds us in relation to neo-liberalism in the African continent, the categorical ordering of the world is about relationships of places to each other.

As noted above, our focus here on the global north and south is not an uncritical acceptance of this schematic and very simplified representation of a very complex geography of diverse and differentiated places that are mutually constituted and materially related, but rather to highlight the hegemonic role this geographical imaginary plays in determining which cities are viewed, by academics and urban dwellers, through the lens of modernity and which through developmentalism. Such is its power that questions of where cities and indeed whole regions are located within it fall to the wayside. It is in the sense of a powerful geographical imaginary that the urban global south/north divide acts as the thread to our reading of the inclusion of gendered subjects in urban studies.⁵

Understandings of geographical imaginaries moreover determine the vantage point from which we understand the social world (Ruddick 2010), with very real consequences. That feminist urban studies fail to make connections between the global north and south repeats unsettling, and commonsense, patterns: not only does the construct of overdeveloped-northern-modernity not speak to underdeveloped-southern-developmentalism but both attract academic attention around these very categories. Furthermore, the uneven circulation of knowledge, with much feminist urban theory flowing from the north to the south, a flow that is moreover redolent of an Anglo-American hegemony, serves to reinforce the domination of northern knowledge production.⁶ We do not wish, however, to paint a static picture; some of the prevailing feminist knowledge of women in cities is being challenged. The right to the city literature in particular has found traction within a global urban studies field moving beyond the domestic versus public, moral economy questions of urban life as detailed in Wilson’s (1992) classic intervention. The city as a crucial site of social movements, including feminist politics, class struggle, economic independence and an array of freedoms, was and continues to be a vibrant domain for understanding urban life in discrepant geographies (Fawaz 2009; Hewamanne 2008a; Phadke 2005; Phadke 2007; Phadke et al., 2009; Wright 2004).

While the literature on women in the urban is rich in its regional diversity, it is our contention that nonetheless geographies of power outlined above continue to problematise the kinds of question brought to bear in different regions concerning women’s lives in the city. Attempts to counter enduring beliefs and commonsensical notions about women’s lives in cities are much needed, as notwithstanding that the ground is shifting rapidly beneath our feet, the notion of “women” and women’s lives in cities for many scholars and policy analysts have taken on an almost stable fixity. But women are not already made ahistorical entities. The ideas of what woman constitutes, of the meanings attached to the term, are mobile and move across historical and geographical terrains and are constitutive of those terrains. These mobile meanings though are often tethered to commonsensical notions of truth that can be taken for granted, which allow the continual availability of women for rediscovery, obscuring the historical and geographical conditions that made and remake them. Not only has this led to hegemonic notions of women’s place(s) in the city, but also of the historical exclusion of specific identities and communities from view (Ali 2011); rubbing up against and revealing, and sometimes rupturing, these hegemonies is feminist work. Articulations of women with the urban cannot presuppose a particular logic, rather the formations they take – the specific combining of public and private, of mobility versus seclusion, and so on – are historically and geographically contingent, constituted through struggle, leading to a broad range of gendered practices and subjectivities.

These articulations have never been more fluid than at this historical juncture as in the early twenty-first century more women than ever before live in cities, and yet in a world swirling in financial, climate change driven and faith-based crises, commonsensical notions of women as being available (for ever more work) are rising to the fore. Critiques of the “forever available” thesis are particularly urgent as neo-liberalism serves to reinforce the gender order of millennial development, blanketing the global south with micro-credit as part of its privatised and gendered poverty alleviation strategy (Roy 2010) and at the same time building its regime of accumulation “on the cornerstone of women’s waged labour” (Fraser 2009b: 113), while simultaneously the maintenance of “traditional gender roles of social reproduction … create a third shift of voluntary, unpaid labour for women” (Roy 2010: 70), effecting profound changes in women’s lives in cities everywhere.

This project asks what might be alternative trajectories of urbanism in the urban global south that, while marked by global processes, are also characterised by local and regional cultural practices and do not have as their necessary reference point northern tropes of modernity. Framed in this way, the kinds of liberal argument and desire that undergird many northern feminist approaches to the urban and their geographical vision(s) are displaced. As Simone eloquently argues in his For the City Yet to Come (2004), the developmentalist framework and its entangled desires and regulatory schemata limits imaginaries, foreclosing the very possibility of understanding the city and life within. Hence we ask: how might women’s struggles, strategies and everyday desires be questioned and rethought by way of a new kind of urban studies that takes gendered urban historical geographies and its positioning after the modern seriously?

In the remainder of this chapter we seek to understand the complex reasons for the ongoing investments in the problematic containers of the global south and north in feminist urban studies. We start by addressing how we understand feminism, its problematic entanglements wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Rethinking feminist interventions into the urban
• 2. Urban neoliberalism, urban insecurity and urban violence: exploring the gender dimensions
• 3. Feminism, urban knowledge and the killing of politics
• 4. Transnational city lives: changing patterns of care and neighbouring
• 5. New mobile women in South China: narratives of female success and the imagination of development in the Pearl River Delta
• 6. Retelling stories, resisting dichotomies: staging identity, marginalization and activism in Minneapolis and Sitapur
• 7. Unsettling narratives: global households, urban life and a politics of possibility
• 8. Feminist perspectives on urban poverty: de-essentialising difference
• 9. Interrogating gendered silences in urban policy: regionalism and alternative visions of a caring region
• 10. Gender and violence in Maré, Rio de Janeiro: a tale of two cities?
• Bibliography
• Index