Gendering the City: Women, Boundaries, and Visions of Urban Life / Edition 1

by Kristine B. Miranne, Alma H. Young, Caroline Andrew University of Ottawa, Marilyn Bruin, Christine C. Cook

Overview

This volume challenges the imagery of cities by looking through a gendered lens at how women utilize urban space. Focusing on the conceptual and methodological manner of boundaries, the book reminds us that women are members of multiple and diverse groups and as such, they can be active, creative, and powerful agents. Multidisciplinary essays, contributed by urbanists, geographers, political scientists, and historians, explore the ways in which women confront, break down, resist, and form new boundaries and interconnections, both visible and invisible. Arguing for a change in the traditional agenda of cities, the authors investigate how aspects of urban life and space would look considerably different if the alternatives and options presented by women and other marginalized groups were taken into account. They urge us toward a better understanding of how diverse social groups interact, how urban space can enhance such interaction, and what role formal and informal laws, by-laws, policies, and other planning measures should play.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780847694518
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	01/19/2000
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.74(w) x 8.94(h) x 0.67(d)

About the Author

Kristine B. Miranne is associate director for the Skillman Center for Children at Wayne State University. Alma H. Young is Coleman A. Young Professor of Urban Affairs at Wayne State University.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction Part 2 Part I: Visible or Invisible? Gendered Urban Boundaries Chapter 3 1 Not Named or Identified: Politics and the Search for Anonymity in the City Chapter 4 2 The Two Major Living Realities: Urban Services Needs of First Nations Women in Canadian Cities Part 5 Part II: Intersections of Gendered Boundaries: Race, Class, and Ethnicity Chapter 6 3 Identity, Difference, and the Geographies of Working Poor Women's Survival Strategies Chapter 7 4 Boundaries Cracked: Gendering Literacy, Empowering Women, and Building Community Chapter 8 5 Black Women as City Builders Chapter 9 6 Women Embounded: Intersections of Public Housing Policy and Welfare Reform Part 10 Part III: Challenging Planned Boundaries Chapter 11 7 Theorizing Canadian Planning History: Women's Gender and Feminist Perspectives Chapter 12 8 Resisting Boundaries? Using Safety Audits for Women Chapter 13 9 Sex, Lies, and Urban Life: How Municipal Planning Marginalizes African-American Women and Their Families Chapter 14 10 Manipulating Constraints: Women's Housing and the Metropolitan Context Chapter 15 Epilogue: Cracks, Light, Energy

Editorial Reviews

An important and useful collection with an impressive mix of senior and junior scholars. The gendered-boundaries concept puts the arguments in fresh perspective, and the material on African-American women and indigenous women is a welcome addition.

Susan E. Clarke

In Gendering the City, Kristine Miranne and Alma Young have brought together an interesting collection of essays about Canadian and U.S. cities. Although the topic, approach, and tone of the chapters of this volume are predictably varied, the editors have done an admirable job in focusing the material on the broad issue of boundaries. The book itself is a slim, attractive volume. The bibliographies and notes are at the end of each chapter and there is a thorough index to the entire volume. The editors have done their job well. The book is valuable, particularly in its attention to race, ethnicity and class in women's lives.

Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geogr Gender

Gendering the City represents a contemporary collection of essays that examine a diversity of women's experiences while successfully adhering to the main theme of visible and invisible boundaries. The political positioning of the book both deconstructs the silencing of women and provides refreshingly innovative ways of rethinking spatial knowledges of the urban environment.

American Journal of Sociology

Gendering the City provides a significant contribution to urban studies, balancing critiques of domination with analyses of how groups and individuals have actively carved out spaces that resist and reconfigure dominant gender regimes. The collection draws on a wide range of empirical work, conducted in both Canada and the United States, to explore the diversity of women’s experiences. It is both grounded and provocative.

Ann Forsyth

This volume would make an excellent resource for readings in urban studies courses. The wide range of topics covered makes the work useful in a range of courses, or for a variety of topics within a survey course. Gendering the City makes a strong contribution in this area.

Urban Studies