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Reclaiming the urban: an intersectional analysis of women’s and men’s experiences of Kolkata’s public spaces
Gender, Place & Culture
Abstract
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https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/WU6FHIXIHXNH6CT8VPEI/full?target=10.1080/0966369X.2021.1927996
Keywords:
Accessibility; feminist geography; global South; intersectionality; safety; urban spaces; violence against women
... The planning of a city involves inclusion of the social, economic and political influences of structures on the relations of individuals living in that city. This was why it was made prominent in the "Right to the City" by Lefebvre (1996), where he distinctly informs the involvement of active participation of citizens in the way a city is being imagined (Biswas, 2019). To have an active participation in the way a city is being planned would also eventually include the right to have a say in how infrastructures could be constructed. ...
A city is a place that consists of several diverse categories of individuals surviving together. In such a setting, the creation of cooperation and equal opportunity of competence is expected in order to excel or progress towards a level of sustenance and development. However, if the level of equal access to spaces and resources are not validly applied to all individuals, then that city requires a change of lens and perspective. Building an inclusive city involving all its inhabitants is a crucial starting point. Re-imagining a city from the lens of the silenced requires an active step towards remaking the manifesto of constructing spaces. Through the perspective of a feminist lens and the theory of "Right to the City," this chapter seeks to explore an attempt to re-make the city of New Kolkata.
To address violence against women in cities, urban scholars and planners have primarily focused on challenging problematic urban built environments, social norms and unequal power relations but have missed emphasising the healing of the harmed individuals and communities. In this paper, we are interested in the role that agency can play in the healing justice process of individuals and communities with experience of violence and spatial trauma. Building on healing justice scholarship, we argue for a multilayered approach to address the range of violences women and marginalised communities experience over time in urban spaces by repairing societal and urban faults while simultaneously tending to the healing and well-being of the impacted individuals and communities. Based on stories from the everyday lives of different groups of women in Kolkata and Chicago, we highlight instances of women reclaiming urban spaces in their everyday lives through varied acts of their agency while also building a sense of community agency, ultimately leading towards healing justice. The temporal component of healing is long-term, but fostering actionable agency is essential in moving towards communities being healed. Therefore, to facilitate healing processes, paying attention to the everyday acts of embodied agency may provide practical tools for urban scholars and planners to understand community needs and desires and make cities inclusive and safe.
Urban research has increasingly embraced the Global South, as recent critical scholarship continues opening to Southern cities, scholars and ideas generated from the South. Here, we (the authors, two women of the Global South) think strategically about ‘the Southern urban critique’, ‘the right to the city’ and ‘smart cities’– as well as some limitations of doing so. Intrigued by the fast pace of smart city development across the Global South, and informed by the ongoing critical debates and increasing empirical work focused on the unfolding of ‘smart’ in the Southern cities, we put forward a research agenda ‘the right to the smart city in the Global South’. Through three lenses of expose, propose and politicise this research agenda articulates the smart city shortcomings from a Southern critical perspective to elevate the ongoing empirical studies on the subject, to shed light on the gaps in knowledge, and to produce a normative alternative vision for ‘just smart city’. Our challenge to readers is to help create such smart cities, to engage with and reflect on the arguments in this positioning piece, and then complement them with further normative, future-oriented work – informed by empirical knowledge – to fully map out the particularities of an alternative Southern smart city, to inform planning and policymaking for just smart cities, and to enact the right to the smart city in the Global South.
Urban planning has been largely ineffective in addressing urban violence and particularly slow in responding to gender violence. This paper explores the public and private divide, structural inequalities, and issues of ethnicity and citizenship, in terms of their planning implications for gender violence. Drawing on evidence from Spain, Mexico and the United States, it examines how economic and social planning and gender violence intertwine. The three case studies demonstrate that the challenge is not only to break constructed structural inequalities and divisions between public and private spheres, but also to promote changes in the working models of institutions and organisations.
The rape of Jyoti Pandey, popularly known as Nirbhaya, sparked a groundswell of public protest because her story represented the perils faced by 'everywoman' in India. This article examines the parallels between the Nirbhaya incident and historical debates on women's sexuality in South Asia, namely the Age of Consent Act of 1891 and the Abolition of Sati Act of 1826. The artistic/literary production of the rape victim as a middle-class, upper-caste, Hindu woman has become a political platform through which Pandey came to symbolise and represent 'everywoman'. Pandey's representation as 'everywoman' allowed for her to be claimed by competing discourses of liberal feminist modernity, Hindu nationalism and Leftist critiques of capitalism, each of which tried to legitimise their claim to politically represent the nation. Through the study of historical events and the discursive manipulation of history by political forces, this article demonstrates the ways in which the Nirbhaya incident reproduced the Hindu, middle-class, upper-caste woman as the normative subject of protest. Furthermore, just as Pandey's body became the site for protest, the bodies of lower-caste, lower-class, rural women remained 'useless' for politics because they are unable to generate affect in the middle class. This differential treatment suggests that the legalistic measures launched by mainstream feminist groups are inadequate for addressing the rape of lower-class, lower-caste, non-Hindu, rural women, whose access to these legal and political frameworks is limited by their subalternity. To conclude, I examine the Delhi rape in a global context, particularly in relation to the assaults in Steubenville, Ohio, to suggest that sexual assault is viewed as endemic to the world, following in the spirit of second wave feminists, but that its redress must arise from local epistemologies.
In this paper I analyze how different aspects of identity combine to shape the experiences of seven young lesbians in public space in Manresa, a non-metropolitan city in Catalonia. I argue that their experiences need to be understood intersectionally and spatially, as complex processes that involve the mutually constituted identities that shift in space. I focus on interviews and Relief Maps to show how these dynamics work and how they are related to larger social processes such as the heteronormalization and adultification of public space.
ABSTRACT This article explores women's fear of urban violence from a spatial perspective. It is based on qualitative data collected in Finland. It shows first that women do not have to be fearful. Boldness is associated with freedom, equality, and a sense of control over, and possession of space. Secondly, the article considers how and why fear of violence undermines some women's confidence, restricting their access to, and activity within, public space. Fear of violence is a sensitive indicator of gendered but complex power relations which constitute society and space. Women's fear is generally regarded as 'normal' and their boldness thought to be risky: the conceptualisation of women as victims is unintentionally reproduced. However, a more critical view might regard fear as socially constructed and see how it is actually possible for women to be confident and take possession of space.
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