ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the fluid and dynamic intersections of homes, jobs, communities and social networks with the aim of better understanding the coconstitution of cities and gender. It is tempting from an urban ethnographic, everyday life perspective to reduce the dynamic complexity of people-place interactions to fragments of activity which are played out in discrete sites over the course of the day – in the street, at the marketplace or shop, at the school gate, on public buses and in factories and offices. Indeed, this provides a straightforward and engaging way of highlighting specific discriminatory practices, such as unequal pay, the so-called ‘glass ceiling’, and sexual harassment and homophobia on public transport, for instance. We adopt this approach ourselves in a number of case studies. At the same time, this ‘static’ approach fails to adequately reflect the messy reality of the overlapping spheres of identity which arguably constitute the essence of the everyday. The purpose of this chapter then is to shift attention away from individual sites and scales of analysis in order to trace the circuits, networks and cultures of reciprocity and learning which intersect and transcend discrete realms, such as ‘home’, ‘work’ and ‘family’ in the reproduction of urban daily life.
