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Episode 4: Whose streets are they anyway?
289 Plays1 year ago
Women are told to look after themselves in the city a night, not to walk home alone, not to walk through dark parks. Cities are seen as dangerous places for women. They are taught from childhood that it’s their responsibility to look after themselves when out and about, and yet all the statistics tell us that women are much more likely to face violence in their own homes than out in the streets.
What does this understanding of urban landscapes mean for the way we think about men and women? How has the way we design cities made some kinds of people feel welcome and some excluded? How might we design cities differently?
In this podcast we will explore the ways in which the urban landscape, and our very ideas of the urban, shape the lives and identities of city residents. I am joined by Dr Leslie Kern, a feminist urban scholar from Toronto, Canada. We will be talking about Leslie’s book, Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World.
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Transcript
Introduction and Overview of Beyond the Map
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome to Beyond the Map, a podcast that looks beyond the obvious to understand the hidden geographies that make our world. I'm Jo Sharpe, Professor of Geography and Scotland's Geographer Royal.
The Impact of Sarah Everard's Tragedy
00:00:23
Speaker
On the evening of the 3rd of March 2021, 33-year-old Sarah Everard left a friend's house in South London to walk home. On her way she met off-duty Metropolitan policeman Wayne Cousins. He kidnapped her, raped her and killed her, then burnt her body and tried to dispose of her remains.
00:00:43
Speaker
In the fevered period before his arrest a week later, women were told not to go out alone, not to go out at night, to protect themselves. It was the same advice that women were given in the 1980s after the murders of women in Yorkshire by the serial killer Peter Sutcliffe. It is the same advice that women always get when violent men attack.
Societal Responses to Violence Against Women
00:01:06
Speaker
Responding to this advice, Scottish National Party MP Hannah Bardell retweeted a headline from the Independent newspaper about a suggestion for a 6pm curfew for all men in areas where women had been killed. Bardell's tweet said, Definitely worth considering. She was ridiculed for this suggestion. Social media responses to her retweet suggested variously that she was a nut job, brainless, a silly cow, a man-hater.
00:01:34
Speaker
and in the media and parliament there was widespread derision for the idea that all men should be made to stay inside because of the actions of a few. Bardell responded, if the notion of a curfew on men because a very small few behave so badly is so abhorrent to you, stop for a second and think about all the times women have had their freedoms limited or been told to stay indoors because of a violent man.
00:01:59
Speaker
I don't want anyone to have to stay inside because of the actions of a few, she continued. Let's not forget, much of the violence against women occurs inside and at home. But we may well be at the stage where we need to discuss all the options, even the ones that sound a bit wacky.
00:02:17
Speaker
Bardel had not made this as a serious policy suggestion, but as an opportunity to raise questions about how we think about our cities. Some women had made the same suggestion around the time of the fear of the Yorkshire Ripper. But it would seem that the idea that all men should be made to stay inside because of the actions of a few is beyond debate. And yet, this is pretty much what all women were being advised to do.
00:02:43
Speaker
What does it tell us about our cities, that it's reasonable to advise women to stay at home, but not men? One of the questions I'm asked most when I talk about my research and teaching is what on earth does feminism have to do with geography?
Urban Landscapes and Gender Norms
00:02:58
Speaker
And yet decades of research have shown that the link between gender and space and place is profound. Although the built environment does not determine the relationship between men and women, it normalizes some things and makes others more difficult to imagine. Recent debates over low emission zones, car versus rail travel, to things like the provision of public toilets have highlighted that the physical form of our cities has differential implications for different users.
00:03:28
Speaker
Today, we're going to be exploring the ways in which the urban landscape and our very ideas of the urban shape the lives and identities of different city residents. And I'm joined today by Dr. Leslie Kern, a feminist urban scholar from Toronto, Canada, and we'll be talking about her excellent book, Feminist City, Claiming Space in a Man-Made World.
00:03:51
Speaker
So the idea that women are a problem for the city is not a new one, of course. And this is something you explore so brilliantly in your book. If you look back to the turn of the 20th century, there were debates then that in many ways parallel or echo some of the issues that we're talking about just now. Absolutely.
00:04:11
Speaker
women's presence in the city, especially in public spaces such as the streets and other venues, has always been a worry, especially when those women were upper-class women, white women whose purity,
00:04:28
Speaker
status, virtue was seen as something that needed to be protected at all costs. And the city was this kind of uncontrolled and uncontrollable environment where women could rub up literally against the wrong sort of people, experiences, places, and then raise questions about
00:04:49
Speaker
those qualities of virtue and purity. So there was a tremendous amount of social control and policing, essentially, of where women could go. Of course, we needed chaperones. And there were some places that were just simply off limits
00:05:11
Speaker
if you were a woman of a certain stature. And of course, if you found yourself in those places, then your status would be called into question. So women were very much expected to control themselves, but the urban environment was also set up in such a way to limit their freedom in order to police these boundaries around their lives and
00:05:36
Speaker
their relationship, their value as property, essentially, to the men in their lives. And one of the things, I mean, there's so many interesting revelations and examples in your book, but one of the ones you talk about is the rise of department stores, which we take for granted now, but this was almost
00:05:58
Speaker
kind of recognition that women were going to be drawn to this exciting new experience of the city and that obviously we had, I suppose, a kind of capitalist imperative in terms of consumption.
Historical Context of Public Spaces for Women
00:06:09
Speaker
So how do you provide an environment that is safe for the kind of middle class women, the respectable women you were talking about? And that's where we see the rise of department stores. Yeah, so department store
00:06:24
Speaker
Today in kind of geography jargon, we might call this like a quasi public space in that it is technically in the public realm, but it's also a controlled environment. It is usually at least partially indoor environment. There is sort of one main purpose.
00:06:45
Speaker
to this space and the nature of the space as a consumption site also kind of controls for the kind of people that would be in that environment. So it was this sort of perfect solution to allow women some modicum of freedom, some access to public space, but without really exposing them to all of the
00:07:10
Speaker
the mixed milieu of the social classes, the potential violence, and of course maybe just the mess and pollution and noise of the growing cities of the Victorian early industrial age. It's interesting that you said we kind of take department stores for granted, but of course in many places department stores are closing down. We don't have them so much and people are also raising questions about
00:07:38
Speaker
some of the comforts that department stores provided that maybe we're losing in an era where malls and department stores are disappearing. And when you say comforts, I immediately think about readily accessible bathrooms.
00:07:55
Speaker
which are one of the things that as I navigate the city, I'm always very conscious of where those are. And if we see the department store as a kind of creation of a positive landscape, there was also more controlling urban design that some people have talked about in terms of the urinary leash, which I think, again, is just a fascinating concept that there was concerns about
00:08:25
Speaker
women being in the city for too long, so if toilets were not provided, that would limit, I suppose, the time that could be spent, but also the extent of travel, if you like, within the city.
00:08:40
Speaker
Yes, in many places, public toilets were really only provided for men. There was something just unseemly to the mindset of the time to even imagine a woman using a toilet that was, you know, sort of semi public, even though, of course, it would be an enclosed
00:08:59
Speaker
kind of private space. And unfortunately, to this day, we haven't really remedied this issue in most cities, we struggle to find truly accessible public
Social Norms and Urban Design
00:09:11
Speaker
toilets. And of course, women tend to struggle more with this because we simply don't have
00:09:16
Speaker
kind of equity of space and services that are that are provided for those needs. And this, to a lot of people, this seems like quite a trivial issue. But I think this is really kind of at the heart of some of the big ideas behind your book in many respects, that it's the it's the everyday built quality of the city that starts to shape. It certainly doesn't determine, but it sort of shapes the kind of
00:09:44
Speaker
the bodies, the kind of people that feel comfortable within the streets, within the city. And you quote the idea that the city is patriarchy written in stone. And these are fascinating ideas that we've got social norms and social identities that then are reflected in the way that the city is built.
00:10:09
Speaker
But then, of course, although social norms might change more quickly, once something is built, we almost get a kind of fossilization of these identities, which then it doesn't make change impossible, but it does reinforce the norm a bit more powerfully. Is that how you would explain it? Yes, absolutely. The built environment is
00:10:33
Speaker
quite durable. We're talking decades, sometimes centuries, the urban form that we coexist with. And I think sometimes we forget that our cities, our homes, our communities, they're built by people and the ways that they build them reflect the norms and values
00:10:53
Speaker
and ideas of the society that creates them. They're not something that just comes to us in a vacuum. Planners, architects, politicians, the people that fund urban development, they're products of the society that they live in just as we are now. And
00:11:15
Speaker
one of the aims of my book is to try to kind of lift that veil a little bit so that we can walk around and see the city with new eyes and perhaps start to notice some of the ways in which norms that maybe are outdated, maybe still linger on a little bit to this day are, as you say, fossilized in the concrete steel
00:11:39
Speaker
glass in the infrastructure, in the layout of the city, in the systems that we design for how we move through the city, the services that we access, and so on. And yes, it is a challenge because even as our social norms change, sometimes the environments that we have just don't support those changes and people really find themselves struggling and sometimes wonder, why doesn't this seem to suit me? Why is it so hard?
00:12:09
Speaker
To be a woman in the city, to be a queer person in the city, to be a newcomer to the city, and sometimes we can take that historical view and say, well, because it was never set up for you to do the kind of things that you want to do.
00:12:23
Speaker
Yes, absolutely, that's beautifully put. But of course, this notion of protecting the respectable woman in the city at the turn of the 20th century, even that had a very specific idea about what was that woman that was being protected. And working class women, for instance, were always in about the city. So this is very much a kind of middle class vision of femininity or respectability.
00:12:51
Speaker
Yes, completely. I mean, the class of women that was considered worthy of protection was a pretty narrow slice of society and working class women, poor women, sex workers, immigrant women, women of color.
00:13:07
Speaker
people who didn't fit the ideal mold of middle or upper class femininity, they weren't really seen as worthy of protection. And in fact, they were seen as even greater problems for the city. Sex workers, of course, were seen as being responsible for spreading vice immorality for
00:13:27
Speaker
tempting, good, God-fearing men, family men, into a kind of ruin. They were seen as potentially spreading, you know, actual physical disease. And so, you know, to this day, we still have extensive efforts to control sex workers in cities. And many of those ideas have not really gone away, even though we couch them in different
00:13:50
Speaker
language. And so I think what you're pointing out is quite right that sometimes we don't want to miss the fact that different women have always been treated differently.
00:14:04
Speaker
in the city and that continues to this day. It doesn't always make sense to talk about women as a homogeneous group. And although the things we're talking about in some respects seem quite distant from us, this concern about
00:14:21
Speaker
women in and respectability and so forth. But many of the ideas that that were articulated at that point really do persist. I mean, from from the smallest issues like like the provision of toilets, which has become quite an issue again more recently around
00:14:39
Speaker
some of the politicisation of the trans debate and access to toilets but also as in the UK as budgets for local councils are being eroded, one of the first things that seems to go are services such as public toilets and then as you say
00:14:56
Speaker
as we're seeing the demise of the department store, that's another location that's going for people. And it seems again, it seems something quite trivial. And yet when certain people are planning to go for a visit in the city, it still has a major implication as to their comfort and their feeling of belonging and just sort of, I suppose, passing through the city without it having to be something that's thought about. Totally. The city, any built environment really is always
00:15:26
Speaker
like sending us messages, basically. Sometimes they're quite overt. It's literally a sign that says, don't walk on the lawn or something of that nature or dead end and so on. But often the signs are more subtle and they're about, as we say, what services are provided, who is made to feel welcome. And we take those messages on. So things like bathrooms really aren't trivial. I mean, every human being needs to use.
00:15:54
Speaker
a bathroom many times a day. And if those are not provided, then we're really left struggling. And this is intensified for people with any kind of disability that impacts how often
00:16:11
Speaker
or for how long they might need to use the bathroom. This is of course a huge issue if you are caring for young children or babies who regularly need their toilet needs attended to and of course it's probably most often women still who are doing that caregiving work
00:16:27
Speaker
It matters if you're menstruating. It matters, of course, the kinds of bathrooms that are there, which are usually gender binary divided bathrooms. And if you don't look as though your gender appearance matches the toilet that you want to go into, you can be
00:16:45
Speaker
subject to violence or exclusion. So all of these things really are sending a message about who belongs to the city, who the city is for, who's welcome. And those are serious. I mean, that has implications for larger questions like democracy and participation and equality and human rights.
00:17:05
Speaker
Absolutely. And it's the fact that this is influencing all sorts of levels of society, all sorts of scales or all sorts of, you know, from the smallest of things, such as an individual person moving through the city all the way through to threats,
00:17:25
Speaker
to people to violence and so forth. And if we start at the smallest of small things, and this is the way that I used to teach a first-year geography class to the undergraduates, and my first class to them, the first lecture, and I always had to remember to wear trousers those days, was that I would get up in front of them
00:17:45
Speaker
and talk about the fact that geography starts with with the body and you know that's not what they're taught at school so there's usually a little bit confusion and I get up and sit on the bench in front of them at the front of the classroom and I say if you've recently been on the bus or you've been at the cinema or you've been on on the underground
00:18:06
Speaker
you know what I mean. And I can see the women in the audience begin to get to catch on. And so I'll sit the way that I was taught to sit, which is to take up as little room as possible, that to be to be feminine is to is to be small is to be contained is to be disciplined. And then, of course, we see what is increasingly called manspreading, the confidence to take up space that men are taught as boys.
00:18:36
Speaker
And it's kind of seems entirely trivial. And yet that is kind of part of this process that that you were you talk about so so well in your book about the different normalizing everyday sorts
Gender Norms in Public Space Usage
00:18:49
Speaker
of things that cumulatively
00:18:51
Speaker
create a welcome for certain types of people and exclusion for others. And I also had a student a few years ago look at where children played. And when children were very, very young, they all had about the same degree of freedom. But as they got older, the boys were able to go further to play just in different places, whereas the girls had to kind of stay closer to the home. So there's that kind of reinforcing about really literally about how much space that you can take up.
00:19:22
Speaker
Yes, as you say, women are socialized to take up as little space as possible and to not be assertive about protecting their personal space. And sure, it seems kind of a small thing about how much room we take up when we're sitting on the subway or on a bus. But I think for many women, especially, we understand this as part of a continuum where, okay, somebody's leg kind of
00:19:47
Speaker
pushing into your personal space. It's more annoying than anything else, but it's also a fact that women are regularly touched and harassed and assaulted on public transportation and in public streets. And so for us, we understand there's a difference between those things, but it is a continuum of experiences that remind us that we're not really entitled to be here in the same way
00:20:14
Speaker
that men are and also remind us of the fact that violence or harassment is a possibility. And in fact, that's one of the reasons why women often don't push back in those situations because we simply don't know what to expect.
00:20:32
Speaker
maybe nothing will happen or maybe the absolute worst will happen, in which case we also maybe know a little in the back of our minds that we just might be blamed for what has happened to us because we dared to act in a way that was outside of the norms of conventional, demure, passive, submissive femininity. So those little things, they accumulate, as you say,
00:21:00
Speaker
And they remind us of the larger, wider, more scary implications of being a marginalized person body in urban environments. Yes. And I suspect some people will hear this and think that's a very dramatic leap to go from man spreading to the possibility of violence. And yet I remember the 1980s in this country, in the UK,
00:21:28
Speaker
there being cases where women had been attacked or sexually assaulted as they were going home and that they were found to be partially culpable in the ensuing cases because they walked home through the park. They should have known that that was dangerous or because of what they were wearing, that that was seen as provocative. Now, you know, that isn't
00:21:54
Speaker
so much the case now. I think now it's the case that often women are drunk too much and they should have known. But the idea that walking in a particular place could mean that you're partially culpable, I think is a kind of common sense view that still does persist in certain ways that she should have known. Of course, she shouldn't have been attacked, but she should have known that that was a dangerous thing to that was a stupid thing to do.
00:22:16
Speaker
she should have known her place. And this is where I started this podcast off from you're talking about some more recent cases where it seems you're here we are again, women being attacked, in one case by the very person who she was expecting to protect her, a police officer.
00:22:35
Speaker
And what was the response? A woman should stay at home until this is sorted. And when Hannah Bardell had the temerity to raise in Parliament, how about we have a curfew for men until we have this sorted? There was just outrage. Why is it that the city works to give this sense of women being out of place in particular spaces and not men?
00:23:02
Speaker
This is where we see that through line, through 150, 200, probably much, much longer in terms of years of those attitudes that we may have new language for, but they haven't entirely disappeared. So the idea that there are certain places where women just don't belong, certain times, especially at night, where women should not be out,
00:23:26
Speaker
in public spaces, those attitudes are still there today. I kind of call it the geography of rape myths, right? The rape myths being more broadly about all of the ways in which women are seen to be to blame for sexual assaults against them. And the geography part is where we get into, well, you shouldn't have been in that place. Why were you there at that time? Why didn't you go with somebody else? Why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do that?
00:23:55
Speaker
And for as long as I think anyone can remember the solution to these sorts of problems has always been to impose more control on women. And even if we now don't impose as much external control over women, we ask women to exercise all of this internal control. So alter the way we dress, alter our movement patterns, change the times of day that we go out,
00:24:21
Speaker
travel in groups, have our phones with us, have money, text someone to tell them where you are. These things become common sense to women. We learn them as girls and they become normalized. We don't even question them until someone points out that this is like a huge psychological burden. And of course, for many women, completely impossible to follow these
00:24:42
Speaker
rules because we have things like jobs and lives that don't allow us to control ourselves in these ways, even if we wanted to. And the solution is never to ask men to change their behavior, even in a soft kind of way, like, hey, stop manspreading. I mean, it's controversial to even suggest that, let alone to suggest a curfew. But it does remind me, I mean, Hannah Bardell raising that now in 2023,
00:25:10
Speaker
During the 1970s, when the Yorkshire Ripper was active in the UK, women also asked for a curfew for men because women were being given the message that they were supposed to stay off the streets, essentially, that anything that happened to them, you know, they were putting themselves in the line of danger. And, you know, some 40 years, 50 plus years later, were still
00:25:38
Speaker
being ridiculed in the same way and so little has changed in terms of the advice that anyone is given about what to do in these situations.
00:25:49
Speaker
But this is where the real power of these particular assumptions and the way that this sort of gendered geography plays out is that it reinforces a particular notion of male and female identities or male and female characteristics, or however you want to put it, that it reinforces the idea that women are vulnerable.
00:26:10
Speaker
that women are weak, that women need protection. I mean, you say in your book that this is very Women's Studies 101, but it's still, as you say, we keep going through the same pattern. It still keeps coming up, which suggests that it may be basic, but it's something that's worth repeating over and over again, that there is this complete paradox.
00:26:29
Speaker
that women are statistically considerably more likely to face violence in the home by someone that's known, not by someone who's going to leap out of the bushes in a darkened park.
Reinforcement of Gender Norms in Urban Landscapes
00:26:41
Speaker
And yet, the way that we talk about women's safety and women's fear really reinforces this idea that women need to be protected in the home, women need to be keeping out of the public.
00:26:52
Speaker
And it's exactly what you and I started off talking about, the fossilisation of particular values within the landscape. If you were to try to say to women are vulnerable, women are weaker, these days that wouldn't be accepted.
00:27:08
Speaker
But that being replicated through a particular geography of fear still happens on a day-to-day basis in terms of what we're told. But also, we all internalise it. I suspect there's not a single woman who's not at some point imagined someone is following them. I hold my key in my hand just in case I ever need to use it as an offensive weapon. It is still an incredibly powerful part of patriarchy.
00:27:36
Speaker
It is. And alongside that feeling that we're being followed or the reality that may well have been the case, we are also never taught to fear or expect that that violence will happen from our intimate partners that happen to be men or, you know, people that we go on a date with or even colleagues that we know in the workplace, family members and so on, when, as you say,
00:28:03
Speaker
Statistically, that is the place where most women will experience violence in their lives. But we are sort of taught to geographically locate fear and danger in public space and in certain kinds of public spaces that probably not coincidentally
00:28:21
Speaker
map onto geographies of class and race and other sorts of stigma in the urban environment and never taught to question the safety of the home. Now, people will probably call us conspiracy theorists if I say this, but perhaps we might
00:28:42
Speaker
think that this works quite well to keep women desiring heteropatriarchal relationships, traditional marriage, and leads them to accept all of the inequality and even outright exploitation that comes with those relationships because we're told that this is where you will get safety and protection.
00:29:05
Speaker
Yes, and I don't think we need to think of it as a kind of grand plot. I think the power of the landscape is such that it replicates a certain types of norm and it makes it more difficult to challenge it, which is why these values persist. But of course women do challenge it. Women are not simply victims and we've seen
00:29:27
Speaker
It's really interesting that many of the challenges are so inherently about particular urban places as well. So take back the night marches are very clearly about putting those bodies that apparently don't belong back into space.
00:29:42
Speaker
back into particular places at night time to become dominant, to literally take back that space or the slot walks in Canada, naked protests in cities in India. So there are attempts to interrupt that normalisation.
00:30:00
Speaker
Yes, and these protests have quite a long history now in cities all around the world. And the frustrating thing is that we continue to need them as we hear kind of the same old, same old attitudes. You know, the slot walks were in response in Toronto to a police officer.
00:30:19
Speaker
saying that if women don't want to get attacked, they shouldn't dress like sluts. And that was that was about 2011 or something ridiculous, wasn't it? Yes, yes, absolutely. Not we're not talking, you know, 100 years ago, 50 years ago, these are unfortunately commonplace attitudes among people that we
00:30:40
Speaker
expect to know better to actually understand the law around consent, but that's not always the case when it comes to police officers and certainly not necessarily when it comes to the general public. So unfortunately, we do still need these events as those interruptions, as those reminders
00:31:02
Speaker
that those attitudes are grounded in misogynist myths that have persisted for a long time, that we haven't quite rooted out of the system yet.
00:31:17
Speaker
But they're also, you know, they are important moments. I think back to myself as a young woman in the city when I participated in those marches, they did feel very empowering. It felt great to be part of a community of women to recognize that you weren't alone in feeling the way that you felt.
00:31:35
Speaker
And that even if it was just for one night to change the dynamic on the streets and to feel that sense of community around and among women in a way that we don't normally do in urban public spaces was a great experience.
00:31:53
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I don't want to suggest that nothing has changed in the time period we're talking about. And, you know, I also think about the changes I witnessed since I came back to Scotland, even. And gentrification is a deeply ambivalent process.
00:32:14
Speaker
in terms of this story that, well, it is for me, that on the one hand, you know, I welcomed the rise of coffee shops as an alternative to pubs. You know, I'm in Scotland and really until the late 1990s, the landscape around the University of Glasgow, which is where I was at the time,
00:32:33
Speaker
pubs where people were where people went to meet and I felt very uncomfortable in a number of the pubs around the university so having a coffee shop was it seemed like a really nice alternative place to go to some of the pubs changed much to the disgruntled of many of my older male professorial colleagues at the time but there was one in particular which put a plate glass window on the front so you know you could see who was in there before going in which I
00:32:58
Speaker
I think is something that a number of women feel much more comfortable if they can see what's going on inside rather than having to launch into a dark bar without any windows. There's health food stores and remade sidewalks and pavements and bookshops and all the kind of things that make a landscape more welcoming to the likes of me. And in many respects, I feel that there has been a progress in terms of the landscape becoming more welcoming, more diverse in terms of what
00:33:27
Speaker
kind of activities are being sold to us.
Gentrification and Its Impact on Women
00:33:32
Speaker
But I think there's a challenge with this. And one of the, one of the things that I found so powerful in your book was towards the end, you talk about how some of the things that are made, put in place to make white women, middle-class women, I suppose, cis women more comfortable actually end up reproducing another form of exclusion.
00:33:53
Speaker
Yes. So all of those kinds of spaces that you described, I mean, it's similar in my life and in my experiences in cities like Toronto and London, where the kind of changeover of certain environments from being a little more industrial, the pub, the kind of diner environment switching to
00:34:16
Speaker
cafes, spaces that are actually a little more home-like in the way that they're set up, maybe a little more friendly to children as well, which impacts women quite a bit. These changes are very welcome for a lot of people.
00:34:32
Speaker
The dark side of this perhaps is that often these changes are associated with and are either kind of harbingers of or signs that gentrification is already underway and by gentrification we mean the takeover and remake of
00:34:49
Speaker
urban neighborhoods by groups that are usually wealthier, often whiter, more powerful. That often results in the displacement of previous communities of working class, perhaps minoritized residents as well. And gentrification can raise the cost of all of the services and the housing businesses in the neighborhood and make these places over time less accessible.
00:35:17
Speaker
many cities have kind of justified gentrification by pointing out that you know the urban environment now seems at least safer for women. Now I don't think that really any of these kind of urban revitalization programs truly had gender equity at their heart but it's a kind of like after the fact justification where you say oh but isn't it so much nicer
00:35:42
Speaker
for women. But as your question suggests, we always have to ask for which women? Who can actually access these spaces? Which women feel safe there? Who has the money to spend in these environments? And conversely, which women have been displaced from those neighborhoods? Who's been evicted because they can no longer afford the rent or because the landlord wants to flip the property and raise the prices?
00:36:11
Speaker
have sex workers been moved into even more dangerous locations to work in the city, which communities are subject now to even more over-policing and
00:36:23
Speaker
potentially violent or hostile interactions with the police. Sorry to interrupt you, but that was something I found quite startling. I guess I just hadn't thought some of this through, that the protection of some women ended up in not just the displacement of others, but actually an increasing criminalization, increasing rates of incarceration of others to protect certain women.
00:36:50
Speaker
Yes, it's an unfortunate outcome of all of these decades of organizing to have violence against women, both in public and in private, taken seriously, actually considered a crime because domestic violence wasn't considered a crime until relatively recently in most places. So all of that organizing, all of that extensive work to push society to say, actually, this is wrong. This can't continue.
00:37:20
Speaker
has meant unfortunately a kind of expansion of the apparatus of the criminal justice system and policing that to my mind doesn't actually do anything to make women safer but just
00:37:34
Speaker
justifies this continued enormous expense and the incarceration of people. But of course, if we look at the statistics, the number of people who are in jail for rape or even for the murder of their female partners and so on, it's shockingly low. There's very little of that. So all of this kind of apparatus has been used to target communities that are seen as problematic in other ways, usually people of color,
00:38:04
Speaker
refugees, newcomer communities, working class, poor people, and so on. And it's this unfortunate coming together of a genuine movement to say we need to take violence against women seriously and this push to use carceral means as a way of controlling other kinds of social problems.
00:38:27
Speaker
And I suppose in some respects, although this is intended to be sort of empowering, can end up in a reproducing that notion of women needing protection of women being weak again. And it is getting that balance. And as you say, there certainly hasn't been the kind of rise and convictions for violence against women, despite all of this, all of the language of protecting women and making landscapes more welcoming for us.
00:38:58
Speaker
No, I don't think it's resulted in that kind of widespread social change. I mean, we certainly during the pandemic, incidences of domestic violence rose quite dramatically in many places that we're collecting data on such things. Again, kind of showing that the home is not really a safe place for many people. And so it's a little bit depressing to think of maybe how little progress has been made
00:39:25
Speaker
in that particular area, the kind of more widespread shift in attitudes and education awareness and so on hasn't really manifested. And I think we can probably say that just the legal arm of things, the stick, and if you will, of kind of social motivation has also not been the deterrent that I think people hoped it would be and has perhaps in the long run done more
00:39:53
Speaker
harm than good to many communities.
Incorporating Feminism in Urban Planning
00:39:57
Speaker
Maybe we could try and end on a slightly positive note. Because of course, as well as the sort of direct resistance of Take Back the Night and another march is another direct action, women have gradually become part of the planning process, the design process, and there have been
00:40:16
Speaker
some attempts to incorporate feminist design principles. Now, you make a comment about a moment of disappointment for your students when they think they've got to that part in your class that you're going to be saying, and here's how we solve the problem that, you know, some more lights, some more street lights and better street furniture is not going to do it. But I was recently in Umia in northern Sweden, where some feminist design principles have been incorporated into the landscape and I was shown
00:40:46
Speaker
with great pride that some of the local activists who show this, and some of this was about lighting, some of it was also about making young women feel more at home in the city, and I think this is an example you use in the book as well, about them actually being asked what would make them feel comfortable in the city, and they wanted to have a place they could meet their friends,
00:41:07
Speaker
that they could see each other face to face, that they could have a little bit of privacy whilst they were doing that. And I have seen the spaces that were produced for that. Do you have hope that these small changes can make a difference? Or are these just chipping away at the surface rather than creating more fundamental change?
00:41:26
Speaker
Yeah, sometimes these changes are kind of small and incremental. But as you say, in many places, there is an effort to incorporate feminist or at least kind of gender sensitive or gender equity principles into planning processes. And of course, this isn't just about safety. Safety and experiences of fear and so on are really important. But that's not the only
00:41:49
Speaker
feminist concern. We have concerns about when and how often the bus comes, right? Does it actually allow us to drop the kids at school and get to work on time? How expensive is it? Is it accessible for a stroller or for someone who uses a wheelchair or for an older woman using a walker?
00:42:08
Speaker
Safety matters, but we also need to think about all of the other ways that women and other marginalized groups need and want to access the city for reasons of fun and leisure, for employment, to study, to connect with their communities, to volunteer, to save the environment, right? All of the different positive, productive
00:42:34
Speaker
aspects of society that we all want and need to participate in. And if we don't have an equity-based lens when it comes to planning everything from where a new school is located to the design of a park to the bus schedule, right, then we're going to end up reproducing the same old exclusions and problems and barriers for so many different groups. So these small things are steps on the right
00:43:04
Speaker
path forward towards recognizing that we can't just keep building cities for and by a narrow group of people kind of at the top of the power hierarchy in society, but that we actually need to listen to different groups to get them involved in planning and to meet the needs of as many people as possible in our urban spaces.
00:43:32
Speaker
What a fantastic way to stop. Thank you. Thank you.