Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World

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He has postgraduate degrees in Political Science and European Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago and the London School of Economics and Political Science respectively. Much of the information was not necessarily new to me when taken separatedly, but it was very enlightening to see all issues linked and brought together under one single mode of looking at urban spaces, when inhabited by women.

Despite some progress, women, disabled people, people of colour, gender and sexual minorities, immigrants as well as Indigenous communities are still being marginalised and excluded from decision- and policymaking processes. Geography here means our relationships with the environment and how we interact with it and how it interacts with us in a way. I don't mind a personal perspective in this kind of writing, but you'll need more than assertions like "every woman feels the same! It is time to dismantle what we take for granted about cities and to ask how we can build more just, sustainable, and woman-friendly cities together.

All of that said, I very much appreciated the Canadian focus that Kern brings and I only wish she could have spoken more about the particularities of Sackville and small Canadian municipalities in a book of these ambitions. Or does that merely make an untenable and uninvestigated assumption that all First Nations would adopt policies in line with the feminist take on urban issues that Kern assembles throughout the book? This amplification of bodily experiences such as exhaustion and pain emerges as a result of everyday labour (Parker, 2017). But it's a rather condescending approach – she admits that women poorer than her might feel differently, but if a woman has means to go to a restaurant, she must feel as threatened there as Kern does.

It wasn’t at all what I was hoping for and I really struggled to follow the overall narrative clearly throughout the book. La città femminista è una città accessibile, sotto ogni punto di vista, a chiunque, ma che non deve ergersi sulle macerie del passato. She frequently references Black and Indigenous scholars (such as fellow geographers Katherine McKittrick and Sarah Hunt, and Indigenous scholar Kim Tallbear). There's a lot about this book that is fascinating and seeing the dots being connected just continues to show how strongly patriarchal values are embedded in our system.My very first realisation about how gendered inequities are built into urban landscapes came with a strong urge to pee–and no public restrooms for women in sight. Parker’s Masculinities and Markets (2017), in which Parker suggests the concept of amplification that refers to the ‘intensity of racialized women’s work, life, and bodily experiences’ (119). Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics.