Leslie Kern

very interesting. i especially liked the expressly feminist and queer analysis.

"Centrality and proximity are critical to the survival of women-headed households in the city. Early research from the 1970s and 1980s illustrated that women make more intensive use of urban services including public transportation, parks, social services, healthcare, and other resources that, by their proximity, make juggling family and paid work, especially for low income women, possible. Women also rely heavily on the informal play space networks that they develop in order to help with childcare, eldercare, transportation, and more. Displacement is, therefore, not just an issue of having access to housing, but of having access to those networks and services. When women lose their housing, they also lose babysitters, carpool buddies, and all sorts of other informal helpers who make up the patchwork of care necessary to survive in places with inadequate social services."

"Given its ability to both exploit and exacerbate gender inequalities, gentrification is a process that reinforces women's subordinate position in the home and shores up heteronormativity. With constrained options in the housing market for single women and women-headed households, women are structurally compelled to form traditional domestic partnerships despite the violence and exploitation of domestic labor that typically accompanies these relationships."

"We ought to keep the focus on what gentrification means for the most vulnerable members of the queer community - those who already had the least access or acceptance in gay villages. This framing highlights how gentrification preys on and reinforces existing divisions and hierarchies of sexual and gender acceptance. The over-policing of particular queer bodies in and around gentrifying gay neighborhoods and former red-light districts has meant increased systemic violence against trans women and especially trans women of color as well as queer and trans youth of color. Arrests of trans women on suspicion of engaging in sex work have accelerated in gentrifying areas, leading to incarceration in men's prisons under dangerous circumstances. Queer youth, who are more likely to be living in poverty or experiencing homelessness, are targeted for ticketing or arrest by police enforcing anti-panhandling laws and nuisance complaints. Queer people of color face racial profiling that manifests in stop and frisk tactics or carding and, of course, the greater likelihood of police violence. All of these groups deal with this violence in a context where they know they have little support from the mainstream queer community who may be actively encouraging over-policing of the undesirable unruly queers that threaten their property values and acceptance from the wider society."

"Gentrification has both taken advantage of and intensified long-standing divisions and inequalities within the queer community. Here it relies not only on the class inequalities among, for example, women and men, cis and trans people, white and racialized queer people, but also on the boundaries of social tolerance for gender and sexual difference. In other words, gentrification firms up and depends on homonormativity, a version of queer life that largely conforms to the institutional, political, familial, and sexual norms of heterosexuality, for example monogamy, marriage, parenthood, property ownership, and nationalism. Queer life that does not fit into, or in fact deliberately exceeds these norms, is being gentrified, sometimes literally, to death. In this way, gentrification supports a liberal agenda of gender and sexual tolerance that accepts and even celebrates a thin slice of the queer community at the expense of others. It also benefits from these social and political dynamics in that it capitalizes on the desire for acceptance by some by offering pathways to normativity through property ownership, consumption, and lifestyle choices."

"The home is the major vehicle for wealth creation for average people. It is the single largest purchase most people will ever make and the biggest asset most will ever own."

"One of the points that [Ta-Nehisi] Coates makes clear is that when someone is robbed, someone else gets richer. In other words, the theft of Black labor, property, and wealth is the foundation upon which the wealth of white people is built. I appreciate his insistence on this. It is too easy to focus on the harm of slavery without acknowledging the other side of the coin, which is that it made white wealth and power possible. And still does."

"Historian Robin D.G. Kelley explains that capitalism developed in context already saturated with racism. Capitalism and racism, in other words, did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of racial capitalism dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide."… (lisätietoja)

Best for:
Urban planners, geographers, feminists. Women who live or desire to live in a city.

In a nutshell:
Feminist Geographer Kern shares her thoughts on on how we can improve urban spaces to the meet the needs of people who aren’t just white men.

Worth quoting:
“The provisions made for ‘bubble dining domes’ while homeless people’s tents were violently dismantled illustrates the stark divide over who we believe should have access to public space.”

“It’s clear that the time has come to decentre the heterosexual, nuclear family in everything from housing design to transportation strategies, neighbourhood planning to urban zoning.”

“Makings cities seem safe for women also tends to make them less safe for other marginalized groups.”

Why I chose it:
My partner and I exchange books for Christmas; this was one of his gifts to me. He knows me well.

Review:
I grew up in the suburbs but pretty immediately made a beeline for cities once I graduated high school. I went to college in Seattle, lived in Los Angeles for a year, move to NYC for graduation school and stayed for seven years, jumped to London, moved BACK to Seattle for another eight years, and am now living in London. While I occasionally dream of living in a tiny village in Scotland, the reality is I think I’ll always need to be living in a city.

But, as author Kern points out, cities aren’t exactly made for me. Now, as a middle-class, assumed-straight, white, thin-ish, able-bodied woman, it’s made more for me that many other women, but still. Cities are built around the needs of white men, and that can make life for the woman have just as much right and claim to experiencing a free and fulfilled life in those blocks frustrating, challenging, and even dangerous.

Kern breaks her book up into six areas to explore: city of men, city of moms, city of friends, city of one, city of protest, and city of fear. The first section serves as the introduction, setting out the main premise that cities have been designed by and for (white) men. From there she discusses each area in turn, focusing on the ways cities either are not welcoming to the subjects (e.g. to moms) or, in the case of the chapter on fear, focusing on how the set-up of cities can contribute to women being unsafe, and the actions women are forced to take to counteract and prevent harm.

As I read books, I write in them (it’s why I tend to not make use of libraries - writing in books is critical to my understanding and absorbing their contents). I was flipping through to write this review, and noticed that I had starred and underlined more in the city of moms chapter, which is odd as I am not a mom. But I have a lot of friends who are moms, and I can see how so much of our cities are not set up in ways to support someone who is caring for (and often carrying) a tiny human.

I appreciate that Kern attempts to take an intersectional view of things. For example, in her chapter on city of fear, she focuses heavily on the reality that many things that some women have been pushing for to make themselves feel safer put other, more marginalized people at risk. An example of this is seeking increased police presence, or the speed with which some women are willing to call the police on people of color - white women might end up feeling safer (though probably aren’t actually any safer), but women who are not white, as well as men of color, are put at an even higher risk. In the city of protest chapter, she also acknowledges how some of her early protest experiences may have been lacking in their understanding of how her demands might negatively impact her trans sister and street-based sex workers.

What a gem of a book. It’s fairly short at under 200 pages, but still manages to pack a ton of insight, research, and examination into those pages without feeling overly academic.

Recommend to a Friend / Keep / Donate it / Toss it:
Recommend to a Friend and Keep… (lisätietoja)

Ciudad feminista es un experimento continuo para vivir de manera diferente, vivir mejor y vivir de manera más justa en un mundo urbano.

Vivimos en la ciudad de los hombres. Nuestros espacios públicos no están diseñados para cuerpos femeninos. Hay poca consideración por las mujeres como madres, trabajadoras o cuidadoras. Las calles urbanas suelen ser un lugar de amenazas más que de comunidad. La gentrificación ha dificultado aún más la vida cotidiana de las mujeres. ¿Cómo sería una metrópoli para mujeres trabajadoras? Una ciudad de amistades más allá de Sex and the City. Un sistema de tránsito que acomode a las madres con cochecitos en el recorrido hacia la escuela. Un espacio público con suficientes baños. Un lugar donde las mujeres puedan caminar sin acoso.

En Ciudad feminista, a través de la historia, la experiencia personal y la cultura popular, Leslie Kern expone lo que está oculto a simple vista: las desigualdades sociales construidas en nuestras ciudades, hogares y vecindarios. Kern ofrece una visión alternativa de la ciudad feminista. Asumiendo el miedo, la maternidad, la amistad, el activismo y las alegrías y peligros de estar sola, Kern traza un mapa de la ciudad desde nuevos puntos de vista, presenta un enfoque feminista interseccional de las historias urbanas y propone que la ciudad es quizás también nuestra mejor esperanza para dar forma a un nuevo futuro urbano. Es hora de desmantelar lo que damos por sentado sobre las ciudades y de preguntarnos cómo podemos construir juntas ciudades más justas, sostenibles y favorables a las mujeres.… (lisätietoja)