Feminist City: A Field Guide

Just okay, really. I’m a woman municipal planner and hoped for guidance on how to have woman centered conversations in male dominated meetings or innovative approaches to planning etc.. Rather this is an observational report on the realities of women in cities. While very important, most women planners know all of this because we live and observe it as planners every day. The book seems to be more suitable for people who are not professional planners but should lean about these matters so planners everywhere can do their jobs without constant public objection.

No amount of lighting is going to abolish the patriarchy.

She starts out the thesis of the book being how cities were made for and by straight white men, then chooses five different areas of focus to prove her point. Those areas are: Motherhood, Friendship, Solitary, Protest, Fear, and Possibility.

The first chapter speaks on what she believes are the difficulties of motherhood in the city, the second is the benefits of female friendship, the third is how awkward she feels being a party of one in the cities, the fourth is her experiences with protests in the cities, the fifth is her thesis on how fear controls women, and the possibilities is her attempt at a conclusion bringing it all together.

What really comes out here is that Kern had difficulty with motherhood. She expresses often in chapter one how she felt awkward, disgusting, and rejected from society as a pregnant woman, going so far as to say, I was embarrassed by my bellys showy-ness, tackily thrusting my intimate biology into the civilized public sphere. I didnt want to glow. I wanted to hide. Throughout the chapter on motherhood, she presents things like stares, broken elevators, glances, and people being rude as ways the city is designed to work against mothers. In chapter two, she talks mostly of how female friendship is important. It has little to do with the city beyond her claim that suburban women have difficulty forming relationships because they never leave their houses while city women can form relationships easy since they have no yards and MUST leave their houses. Theres a very sad moment in this chapter about how she doesnt imagine herself living her life with a loving partner or her children around her and saying shed prefer to retire like the cast of Golden Girls because the traditional retirement with your spouse is just boring as Hell. This read like cope from an unwanted and depressed woman, but I wont go any further into that. The chapter about living alone showed more of Kerns insecurity with herself as she constantly spoke of checking what other people were doing, whether a restaurant had other people eating lunch alone before she would go in. She expressed a lot of fear of what other people thought of her, which seemed very off for someone claiming to be a counterculture revolutionary. The chapter about protest was more or less reminiscing on the protests shes been involved in or witnesses, while the chapter about fear made the claim that cities were designed to make women fearful of everything in order to control them. Simultaneously, Kern claims that women are strong, powerful, brave, and defy fear all the time. To say that women dont do things out of fear is to take away female autonomy.

Kern constantly presents that the city is made for men by men with the evidence that its dangerous and this is by design against women. In the books introduction, she brings up her brother and makes the claim that any differences in their lives must be because hes male and shes female since thats the only difference between them she can think of. She uses this mindset throughout the book to assume everyone who is like her (female, white) will have the same experiences as her and everyone who ISNT like her in some aspect will not be able to have the same experiences as her, so they must, by default, have the OPPOSITE experiences. In some cases, it was she felt fear, it mustve been because shes a woman, and so any man, all men, dont feel fear in the same way. At least not white men. She assumes people like her take the same precautions, have the same thoughts, and anyone with differing demographics cant and dont. She projects herself, then, to be an every man when frankly, shes not. Shes insanely privileged. Comparing this to her article interview where she assumed every white home would be inoperable without immigrants because white people have nonwhite housekeepers and nannies She seems to assume every white person has as much money as she does And if thats not true, Id enjoy her explanation.

In the end, she claims the cities are sexiest by being dangerous because she feels in danger. By chapter 5, she looks like a paranoid schizophrenic afraid of her own shadow. Even going so far as to claim you should be more afraid of your family than strangers because domestic violence happens.

Leslie Kerns conclusion seems to be, she doesnt know what she wants, she doesnt have a plan. Everything you do to make the cities safer and better for white women, you make it worse for literally every other demographic and tbh, who cares about changing the city? Women are in MORE danger at home.

At the very least, I think Kern does a great job at proving women can be insanely irrational and emotional through her own examples and logic presented in this book.

With thought-provoking imagery of ejaculating skyscrapers, Dr. Kern reminds the reader of the hazards that confront the umbrellaless in our society. One only wishes for a giant shower of latex to rain down and sheath these skyphallusus, protecting us from the oppressive forced copulation of living in cisgendered heteronormative capitalistic white male urban domination!

Feminist City investigates the impact of the white patriarchy on how women navigate urban spaces. Although its something that I hadnt really thought about until now, it immediately made sense to me. I knew that when NASA began recruiting women astronauts, the biggest hurdle was that all the equipment was designed by men, for men, so either women had to adjust how they used it (a difficulty in addition to, you know, SPACE FLIGHT), or NASA had to spend the money to overhaul everything. So the idea that cities have been built by, overwhelmingly, straight white men, for straight white men, and exclude how literally everyone else uses cities, putting them in the most vulnerable positions? Yep, Im there, tell me more.

It explores the breadth and depth of city life, how different people use public areas and how theyre clearly designed for men without children and periods. The book is enlightening and the problems it spotlights are endlessly frustrating. I wish there were clear, easy answers to how to make a city not only safe but also navigable and usable for marginalized people, and its not the books fault that the answers so far are few.

This year, my goal is to read all the books on Kate Hardings syllabus for A Master Class in Womans Rage, and Feminist City should 100% be added to it. Its comprehensive and well written, and it brought the receipts. Its going to be the go-to book for anyone looking to overhaul the patriarchal leanings of traditional urban planning and redesign.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

‘This is the space that I write from. It’s the space where my experiences lead me to ask, “why doesn’t my stroller
fit on the streetcar?” “Why do I have to walk an extra half mile home because the shortcut is too dangerous?”
“Who will pick up my kid from camp if I get arrested at a G20 protest?”

One of several examples where important messages are let down by Kerns insatiable desire for point scoring.

Overall I enjoyed the brain food contained within this book. However, the author couldn’t help but treat the work like a vanity project. It felt like there was far too much focus on Kerns personal life experiences which are by most peoples standards *extremely* comfortable. To her credit, she does occasionally acknowledge her privilege.

The ‘Notes’ section provides lots of great references which makes for enjoyable supplementary reading on the subject, the majority of which is written with much more consistency than ‘Feminist City’

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