ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the key contributions of feminist theories to the understanding of urban life. It explores the ways that patriarchy is expressed across different spaces and places, noting that urban processes produce gendered configurations of urban space. The chapter examines how women's presence in public space has been contested over time, noting recent departures from notions of hegemonic femininity that challenge dominant assumptions about women's rights to the city. Finally, it discusses that an awareness of the feminist theory's contribution to urban studies is vital if we are to create more just and diverse cities. The modernist equation between femininity and domesticity gave rise to stereotyped notions that a women's place is in the home. Many debates in urban geography revolve around the status of public space. The fact that urban studies itself might in some way be complicit in the gendering of the public realm has also been alleged by many feminist commentators, past and present.
