Feminist Interventions:
whether “critical” urban scholarship has
Anglophone World
LESLIE KERN
Mount Allison University, Canada
Anglophone feminist interventions use West-
ern feminist theory and politics both to
understand gendered experiences of urban
space and urban life, and to conceptualize the
complex relationship between urban space
and social relations, particularly relations of
difference and inequality. Advancing quickly
beyond a straightforward (but necessary)
argument for including women as subjects
and participants in urban research, feminist
scholarship has worked with a wide range
of theoretical tools, including poststruc-
turalism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and
postcolonialism, to query the construction
of identity, the working of power, and the
nature of the interconnections among gender,
race, class, sexuality, disability, and other
axes of difference in relation to urban space.
Methodological innovations, especially with
respect to collaborative, mixed-method, and
praxis-oriented research, have also been a
significant part of feminist contributions.
Feminist scholarship can be characterized
as breaking down and working across persis-
tent analytical, empirical, and methodological
divides: economic versus sociocultural; public
versus private; recognition versus redistribu-
tion; and qualitative versus quantitative. The
divide between anglophone scholars situated
primarily in the Global North and feminists
working in other languages and in the Global
South remains problematic, but recent work
seeks to build better bridges among scholars
in different geographic contexts. Despite
almost 50 years of feminist interventions
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies. Edited by Anthony Orum.
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118568446.eurs0100
in urban studies, questions remain about
truly incorporated the insights of feminist
theory.
EARLY INTERVENTIONS: INCLUDING
WOMEN
Women have long advocated for and con-
tributed to changes in urban planning, policy,
and research. Jane Addams, the founder
of Hull House in Chicago in 1889, notably
provided housing, health, and education ser-
vices for women and immigrants in the city in
order to facilitate their employment and inde-
pendence. However, feminist concerns did
not permeate urban studies until the 1970s.
Feminist interventions drew on the grow-
ing field of feminist theory in the academy,
as well as the insights and struggles of the
women’s movement. Prevailing attitudes
about women’s primary roles as homemakers
and mothers meant that women were not
seen as important urban subjects or actors.
However, journey-to-work and time–space
path studies revealed that women had longer
and more complex journeys through cities
than did men, making use of multiple forms
of transportation and stopping at several
different locations such as childcare, school,
work, and shopping. Furthermore, research
showed that typical land-use patterns, such
as segregated zoning of residential and com-
mercial areas, aggravated women’s already
complicated travel plans by increasing the
distance between services. By making women
visible as urban subjects, feminist scholars
demonstrated that women and men had dif-
ferent experiences of urban space and urban
life. This research highlighted the androcen-
tric nature of urban research, and expanded
2 F E M I N I ST I N T E RVE N T ION S : A NG LOPHON E WOR L D
the field of who and what counted as valid
research subjects and topics.
These early interests in gendered expe-
riences of urban space led feminists to
topic areas such as work, housing, trans-
portation, suburbanization, and urban
planning. The form and function of the
city itself was critiqued as patriarchal, in
that it reflected the lives, needs, priorities,
and experiences of men, while ignoring
women’s needs as workers, homemakers,
mothers, and consumers. In addition, pater-
nalistic concerns about women’s morality
produced social constraints on if and when
it was seen as appropriate for women to
be in public space, to be alone, or to work.
Many empirical accounts of women’s all too
common experiences of harassment, fear,
violence, and difficulties in navigating the
city seemed to confirm the perspective that
the city was unwelcoming and often hostile
to women.
However, the focus on women’s exclu-
sion from the city elided women’s agency
and choice-making, as well as the fact that
urban life offered many structural benefits
to women. Researchers pointed out that the
suburbs were lacking in public transportation
and public space, were culturally and eco-
nomically homogeneous, and were generally
confining and isolating places for women. In
contrast, the city, it was argued, was where
women could be liberated from traditional
gender norms, and could gain easier access
to employment, social services, childcare,
transportation, leisure, and retail (Wekerle
1984). In short, urban life could best support
women’s multiple roles and identities. More-
over, women were active agents in shaping
cities and their own lives, resisting patriar-
chal control over their bodies, movements,
and choices. The tension in feminist urban
research between notions of the city as threat-
ening, and the city as empowering, has abated
as more nuanced accounts of both women’s
experiences and the structural forces shaping
cities have developed.
BUILDING FEMINIST URBAN THEORY
The indifference to women’s lives in urban
planning and design was mirrored in the
work of many urban researchers, whose
political-economic frameworks focused on
production and consumption, while ignoring
social reproduction and the work of women
in the domestic sphere. An urgent invitation
for Marxist political economy to take gen-
der seriously came from socialist feminists,
notably in a key piece by Mackenzie and
Rose (1983) that problematized the spatial
and ideological separation of work and home
as a historically specific “fix” for a distinctly
gendered crisis of labor reproduction and fear
about social cohesion (e.g., the nuclear family
and female respectability). Socialist feminists
made the case that political-economic shifts,
such as urban restructuring and deindustri-
alization, could not be understood without
attention to changes in gender norms and
roles, and that ideas about gender permeated
urban economic policy. A central argument
of feminist urban scholarship was developing:
that cities were critical sites for the produc-
tion of gender roles, relations, and identities,
and that gender was also a core constitutive
dimension of urban space.
This move beyond treating gender as a vari-
able meant that feminist urban scholars began
conceptualizing the ways that gender itself
was a social construction and social relation
shaped through spatial relations. Feminists
contended that it was also important to study
the spatial manifestations of male power
and privilege, and to understand how mas-
culinities are shaped in urban contexts. For
example, McDowell’s (1997) research with
financial sector workers in the City of London
explored how place, work, and power shaped
 F E M I N I ST I N T E RVE N T ION S : A NG LOPHON E WOR L D
expressions of masculinity and femininity.
More place-sensitive accounts of gender iden-
tity, performance, and expression emerged,
deconstructing straightforward binaries of
female/male and complicating the concept of
“woman” as a biological or stable category.
These accounts relied on research pro-
duced via feminist qualitative methodologies,
which gave epistemological value to experi-
ence as a form of knowledge about the city.
In particular, the experiences of subjugated
groups, like women and minorities, were
sought out as both a corrective to the lack of
such perspectives in urban research, and as
privileged sources of knowledge about domi-
nant systems of oppression. Grounded in the
everyday, feminist research recognizes that all
knowledge is situated: it develops from a par-
ticular social and geographical location, and
therefore attention to the power dynamics
of knowledge production and legitimation is
critical. The political orientation of feminist
work led to the growth of praxis-oriented
methods (combining theory and practice)
such as participatory action research and
collaborative research approaches that seek
to empower the research participants and
put their concerns at the center of the work
(Pratt 2009). Innovations in feminist-oriented
quantitative work, particularly with GIS (geo-
graphic information system) technologies,
have also enabled the use of mixed-method
approaches to addressing feminist issues.
DIFFERENCE, POWER, IDENTITY
By the 1990s, feminist interventions into
geography were established enough for the
launch of a new journal, Gender, Place and
Culture: The Journal of Feminist Geography, in
1994. Here, anglophone feminist urban schol-
ars could debate theoretical accounts of the
mutually constitutive role of gendered social
relations and the urban built environment,
3
while growing the body of empirical evi-
dence for this relationship. Gender, Place and
Culture also created a space for feminists
to challenge one another, in particular with
respect to the issue of difference. Following
Western feminist scholarship more generally,
feminist urban studies underwent a period
of reckoning with difference, identity, and
subjectivity (Kobayashi and Peake 1994).
Race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, ability, age,
and gender expression were among the cat-
egories that black, Third World, indigenous,
working-class, disabled, and queer feminists
insisted be incorporated and adequately
theorized through the framework of intersec-
tionality: the understanding that structures
of privilege and oppression do not operate
independently, or even additively, but that
they interlock to reinforce, complicate, and
produce one another. Trenchant critiques of
the whiteness of feminist urban geography,
the overemphasis on the lives of middle-class
heterosexual cis-gendered women, and the
overrepresentation of Western cities and
experiences emerged.
Out of these critiques grew a more the-
oretically diverse feminist urban studies.
Frameworks such as postcolonialism nudged
socialist feminists to account for differ-
ences beyond gender and to look outside
of the usual subjects, cities, and neigh-
borhoods for movements, politics, and
agency. Issues of migration, globalization,
and colonization were brought into conver-
sation with the urban in part by viewing
urban life from the perspective of urban
“others,” including migrants, the poor,
and indigenous peoples. Intersectionality
has become a backbone of feminist inter-
ventions, although the project of radically
decentering dominant identities and places
within feminist urban studies is incom-
plete. New subfields and areas of interest
that may have branched off from feminism
or developed in parallel fashion continue
4 F E M I N I ST I N T E RVE N T ION S : A NG LOPHON E WOR L D
to push the boundaries of urban studies,
including queer and trans geographies,
geographies of disability, geographies of
youth, childhood, and aging, black and
antiracist geographies, and indigenous and
de-colonial geographies.
Attention to difference has often been
misinterpreted as a narrow focus on issues
of identity and representation at the expense
of questions regarding power and the pol-
itics of redistribution. However, feminist
urban scholars have refused this binary and
worked to illustrate the material dimensions
of discourse and its connection to power.
Influenced by Foucauldian notions of power
as a relation, as a productive force that runs
through even the most micro-scale social
relations, as connected to knowledge produc-
tion, and as a force that always produces resis-
tance, feminists have explicated the deeply
interwoven nature of symbolism and repre-
sentation with material inequality in cities.
An example is the ways in which sexualized
and heterosexist representations of women
in public advertising work to reinforce the
exclusion of women and LGBTQ (lesbian,
gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) people
from the public realm by constructing them
as inferior objects and others. A poststruc-
turalist orientation to theory allows feminists
to deconstruct and resist universalist or
totalizing explanations about the city and
social relations, and to see discourse as pro-
ductive of historically and spatially specific
kinds of subjects and subjectivities.
Far from ignoring questions of economic
redistribution, feminists have been deeply
concerned with the changing nature of social
reproduction and women’s paid labor as the
welfare state is retrenched and neoliberal-
ism rolled out in cities around the world.
While providing strong empirical evidence
for the disproportionate harms visited upon
women, racialized groups, and other minori-
ties in this context, feminist research has also
recognized the importance of labor, care, and
production/consumption processes that take
place outside of strictly capitalist formations
(Gibson-Graham 1996). Expanding the field
of what is considered “economic” and con-
necting this with the social, feminist scholars
have enriched urban economic geography
by making community resistance to capital-
ist norms visible. Similarly, feminists were
among those who sought to bridge and/or
dismantle the analytical divide between
scholars who favored so-called supply-side
or economic explanations for the production
of gentrification, and those who insisted on
the significant role of culture (i.e, demand) in
shaping the process. Feminist gentrification
researchers also noted early on that women’s
changing labor market participation was a
key factor in this process, as were chang-
ing household and family dynamics, such
as woman-headed households and lesbian
partnerships.
In the 2000s urban scholars were intrigued
by the release of new English translations of
some of Marxist philosopher Henri Lefeb-
vre’s writings on cities. The concept of the
“right to the city” resonated with researchers
in the context of increasingly harsh urban
fiscal austerity measures, unjust policing, and
housing crises. Feminist scholars insisted on
the importance of considering gender, race,
and sexuality in new scholarship on claims
to the urban and the notion of urban citi-
zenship, as Lefebvre’s primarily class-based
revolutionary ideas gained traction with
neo-Marxist urbanists. Similarly, as theories
of urban neoliberalism came to dominate
political economy literature in urban studies,
feminists attempted to intervene with theory
that explicated the ways in which gender and
other systems of privilege and oppression are
deeply imbricated with neoliberal rationales.
For example, feminist scholarship on urban
revitalization and the notion of the creative
city illustrated the gendered, racialized, and
 F E M I N I ST I N T E RVE N T ION S : A NG LOPHON E WOR L D
heteronormative nature of contemporary
urban policy-making and the need for the-
ory, data, and research methods that do not
privilege class inequality as the primary force
shaping cities.
CURRENT INTERVENTIONS
Feminists were simultaneously exploring
issues of emotion, affect, and embod-
iment, as well as connections with the
more-than-human, in producing urban space
and urban relations. The role of emotion in
shaping urban housing, work, and leisure
decisions has been investigated, as have the
embodied experiences of fatness, disability,
pregnancy, homelessness, drug use, illness,
and being a trans person. Attention to the
materiality of embodiment and bodily subjec-
tivity allows urban scholars to think about the
mutually constitutive relationship between
bodies and cities: how the urban shapes
corporeality, and vice versa. Human–animal
relations and the socionatural environment
are also of interest – for example, in practices
of urban agriculture and homesteading, and
in community responses to issues such as
climate change and environmental racism.
Feminists have not conceived of these inter-
ests in feelings, bodies, and nature as distinct
from political economy, but as part of the
complex web of forces and relationships that
produce – and are produced by – the urban.
Feminist scholarship continues to push
boundaries and break down analytic divides
in urban studies. The tendency to view par-
ticular Global North cities as exemplary sites
for theorizing and to position Global South
cities as empirical case studies has been chal-
lenged, enriching our understanding of “the
urban” beyond Eurocentric models of urban
change and development. Feminists continue
to ask hard questions about the politics of
knowledge production, especially as Global
5
North scholars propose global-scale theoret-
ical models, such as planetary urbanization
or the notion of an urban world. In the move
toward abstract, unsituated, and universal-
izing theory, feminists note that everyday
life and the experiences of groups such as
women, migrants, and racialized minorities
are flattened or left out of theory-building.
By refusing to cede the question of what the
urban comprises to those who ignore the con-
stitutive nature of social difference, feminist
interventions remain critical to the creation
of urban theory and research that addresses
issues of justice, inequality, and social change.
SEE ALSO: Emotional Geographies; Fear and
the City; Feminist Interventions: Voices from
the South; Gendered Space; Intersectionality;
Masculinities; Queer Spaces
REFERENCES
Gibson-Graham, J. K. 1996. The End of Capitalism
(As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political
Economy. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kobayashi, Audrey, and Linda Peake. 1994. “Un-
natural Discourse: ‘Race’ and Gender in Geog-
raphy.” Gender, Place and Culture, 1: 225–244.
DOI: 10.1080/09663699408721211.
Mackenzie, Suzanne, and Damaris Rose. 1983. “In-
dustrial Change, the Domestic Economy and
Home Life.” In Redundant Spaces in Cities and
Regions: Studies in Industrial Decline and Social
Change, edited by James Anderson, S. Duncan,
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McDowell, Linda. 1997. Capital Culture: Gender at
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Pratt, Geraldine. 2009. “Circulating Sadness: Wit-
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DOI: 10.1080/09663690802574753.
Wekerle, Gerda R. 1984. “A Woman’s Place Is in the
City.” Antipode, 16: 11–20.
FURTHER READING
Bondi, Liz, and Damaris Rose. 2003. “Constructing
Gender, Constructing the Urban: A Review of
Anglo-American Feminist Urban Geography.”
6 F E M I N I ST I N T E RVE N T ION S : A NG LOPHON E WOR L D

Gender, Place and Culture, 10: 229–245. DOI:
10.1080/0966369032000114000.
McKittrick, Katherine. 2006. Demonic Grounds:
Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Peake, Linda, and Martina Rieker. 2013. Rethinking
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Pulido, Laura. 2002. “Reflections on a White Disci-
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