Feminist City - Leslie Kern

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could perpetuate colonial practices and discourses that harm the efforts of Indigenous people to reclaim lands taken and colonized. Asking these kinds of questions requires an intersectional approach and some level of self-reflection on my own position.

      Starting from my own body and my own experiences means starting from a pretty privileged space. As a white, cis, able-bodied woman I know that in most cases, I have the right kind of body for moving through the post-industrial, leisure, and consumption-oriented modern city. I speak English in an English-dominated country. I have formal citizenship in two nation-states. My settler status on Indigenous land is rarely questioned. I’m not Christian but being Jewish is unremarkable in Canada and not visible to most, although a resurgence of anti-Semitic rhetoric and violence makes me type that with a sense of increased wariness. In general, as someone who writes about gentrification for a living, I’m very aware that my body reads as a marker of successful “renewal,” signifying that a space is respectable, safe, middle-class, and desirable.

      My body might also signify danger or exclusion for people of colour, Black people, trans folks, disabled people, Indigenous people, and others for whom spaces dominated by whiteness and normative bodies are not welcoming. My presence could suggest that a petty complaint to the manager or a life-threatening phone call to the police is a moment away. My comfort will likely be prioritized over their safety by those around me and by the city in general. While I can’t change most of the features that mark me in these ways, I can be aware of what my body signifies and check the impulse to assert that I can and should claim all urban spaces for my own. If my presence is going to lead to the further marginalization of already-struggling groups, then I need to strongly consider whether my presence there is necessary.

      This embodied privilege doesn’t negate gendered fears and exclusions in my life. Rather, the privileges that I hold intersect with and inform my experiences as a woman. Throughout the book, I try to be transparent about what my partial perspective offers, and what it obscures. Working with the commitment to understand that all knowledge is situated—i.e., all knowledge comes from some-where—requires me to acknowledge that even where I am (or was) an “insider,” for example, in my hometown of Toronto, my perspective isn’t definitive.29 For many other cities that I write about, I’m an outsider, which means I must guard against reproducing sloppy stereotypes or problematic images of urban communities to which I don’t belong. I also have to be explicit about the fact that my urban experiences and my geographic expertise are rooted in global north cities and western bodies of research. While I’ve sought out relevant examples and case studies from a wider range of places, I’m not able to do justice to “women’s questions” arising from global south and Asian cities. This gulf is a persistent problem in feminist urban geography, one that many have identified as a key challenge for twenty-first century scholars.30

      If you’ve flipped through to my author’s bio, you’ll have noted, maybe with some puzzlement, that I work at a small university in the territory of Mi’kma’ki in what’s currently known as eastern Canada. While we have indie cafés, a hipster bar, and even a gluten-free bakery, Sackville, New Brunswick is a rural town of around five thousand people. It sits about forty kilometres from the nearest city, Moncton, whose population would easily fit inside one London borough. Not exactly an urban hotspot. The pigeons that have set up camp on my office roof are the most urban element of my day. They scribble and scrabble their way across the slanted ceiling, cooing and fighting. The university is trying to get rid of them, but obviously I root for them to avoid their executioners.

      I’ve lived here for ten years. When I was first offered a nine-month contract, I nearly turned it down after realizing how tiny Sackville was. “I can’t live there,” I thought. “I’ll turn it down tomorrow.” That’s how bound up the city was with my personal identity. After a restless night, though, I realized that as much as I loved Toronto, full-time employment wasn’t to be rejected. One contract stretched into three and finally a tenure-track appointment and tenure. Ten years. Long enough that I can no longer consider it a temporary relocation from Toronto. But I remain an urban geographer and a city lover.

      Where to begin? Begin with the material. The matter of the body. Adrienne Rich lists the particularities of her body—scars, pregnancies, arthritis, white skin, no rapes, no abortions—as a reminder of how her body keeps her grounded in her own perspective, of what it allows her to write and speak. What does my body allow me to write and speak? I could begin with my once-pregnant body, sweating and nauseated on a north London train. I could begin with my tired shoulders, aching from forcing a stroller through ice-choked Toronto streets. I could begin with my feet, slipping gratefully out of my hot shoes and into the cool grass of High Park, where I lie back and people watch. This meeting point of bodies and cities is at the heart of “asking women’s questions” and thinking about the “feminist city.”

      These questions ultimately have to help us imagine and enact different urban futures. Inequality, violence, and deprivation still plague cities around the world. Dangerous nationalist movements are finding expression in acts of white terrorism that target diverse urban communities. Climate change is bringing serious challenges to questions of where and how we live. And the effects of all of these issues are very much intertwined. Although large-scale changes at both individual and societal levels are required, we needn’t invent universalizing grand visions or utopian schemes in order to start making things different, better. Alternative visions already exist, both in design and in practice. From schemes to make public transportation safer for women to visions of police and prison abolition, activists, scholars, and everyday folks have long dreamed and theorized and practiced different ways of being together in cities. In fact, we all have the capacity to make new urban worlds—feminist urban worlds—even if those worlds only last a moment, or only exist in one little pocket of the city. Part of the challenge is recognizing where those alternatives are already in play and figuring out if they can be scaled up or adapted to different environments. In this book I’ll share a variety of those kinds of projects, both old and new. My hope is that you can learn to see those alternatives on the ground, to have your own conversations about gender, feminism, and city life and find your own ways to take action on doing cities differently.

      If you’ve ever been pregnant, the “geography closest in” gets real strange, fast. Suddenly, you’re someone else’s environment. And everything about how your body moves through the world and is perceived by others is about to change.

      I was pregnant with my daughter Maddy over a typically dreary London winter and through what felt like an unusually warm spring and summer. I had a part-time office job in Kentish Town. My commute from Finchley Central was only five Tube stops but most days it felt interminable. When I worked a morning shift, my nausea would force me off the train at Archway where I’d stumble to a bench and try to calm my stomach before gingerly re-boarding a new train. Before I was visibly pregnant there was no chance of being offered a seat, no matter how waxy and green my face. This lack of hospitality didn’t improve much even after my belly expanded.

      I was determined to be one of those pregnant people who carried on with their normal lives as though nothing had changed. This was long before Serena Williams won a Grand Slam tournament while pregnant but, I was channeling that kind of spirit. I was a recent women’s studies graduate with my own copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. I was prepared to be fierce and stick to my feminist principles in the face of the pathologizing, misogynist medical profession. I soon found that since midwives still dominated pre- and post-natal care in Britain, my anger at the system was a little misdirected. But I wasn’t at all prepared for the way that my place in the city was changing.

      I hadn’t yet heard of “feminist geography” but I was certainly a feminist, and my feminist self was bristling at every turn. My body had suddenly turned into public property, available for touching or comment. My body was a big inconvenience to others and they didn’t mind letting me know. My body’s new shape had taken away my sense of anonymity and invisibility in the city. I could no longer blend in, become part of the crowd, people watch. I was the one being watched.

      I didn’t know how much I

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