ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the reader to new and different ways of seeing the city from a gender perspective. While we place gender in the foreground as a fundamental site of inequality, we acknowledge along with other feminist scholars that this constitutes just one side of a ‘wicked triangle’ of race, class and gender (Grünell and Saharso 1999). Travelling around the world, towns and cities are encountered which might not immediately appear to be ‘gendered’; yet we argue that they are. The ‘concrete’ sense in which the city is constructed over many hundreds of years and at vast expense tells a different story from more ephemeral manifestations of popular culture such as fashion, television and advertising, for instance. Cities assume a semi-permanent spatial arrangement and material culture, filtered through the psychological architecture of belief systems in a constant state of flux. Over time these cultures sediment in the form of buildings, monuments, political and administrative systems, which in turn come to symbolise and reinforce powerful regulatory norms and stereotypes. A particular challenge for the systematic intertwining of cities and gender, indeed for gender mainstreaming in general, is to prevent gender being defined as ‘women’. Meeting this challenge requires a comprehensive overview of the related disciplines as well as new tools and techniques of urban ethnographic analysis.
