The woman-made city feminist utopia or practical possibility?
p. 73-87
Texte intégral
INTRODUCTION
1In most West European countries, more women than men live in cities, yet cities are largely man-made. Although, they can be emancipating for women offering many advantages in terms of educational and job opportunities, access to cultural facilities and greater freedom from social control, cities also reflect the unequal power relations in society in relation to gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality and ability. Even if the number of women politicians, administrators, planners and architects is increasing, ‘male’ norms still guide the planning and functioning of cities, often shaping places/spaces in ways that are negative for women and others who deviate from the white, heterosexual, able bodied, male norm. This is not just in terms of the physical structure of the city where such things as zoning into different land uses for living, working, shopping and so on result in tiring backwards and forwards journeys, for example, between childcare facilities/school, work, shops and home. There is also an ‘emotional’ dimension – the attitudes and the ways of being and thinking embodied in these places/spaces that create symbolic orders and (invisible) boundaries for women (and other Others). Empty, ‘no-man’s land’ between uses, badly lit streets, parks and underpasses, advertising and other forms of street ‘decoration’ that sexualize the urban room, create places where women feel unwelcome, excluded, ill-at-ease and/or insecure. While the dominance of male norms can lead to feelings of frustration and powerlessness to influence the physical, psychological and political processes that shape cities, women are not helpless ‘victims’ of the city. Despite living in cities that they largely neither control nor design, women are, nevertheless, active agents frequently attempting to re-conceive the city, to challenge and permeate the gendered boundaries, through the practices of their daily lives.
2A basic principle for a democratic city must be that women and men have equal right to the city. However, what would a city that is a ‘good’ place for both women and men look like? As a step in this process, we have tried to capture women’s visions of the city in two Swedish cities: Umeå and Norrköping. The absence of ‘woman-made cities’ has led us to use examples from feminist science fiction and feminist writings as a basis for stimulating discussion. We have carried out focus group interviews with groups of women from different sectors and backgrounds. These include women running their own businesses, women working in the caring services, women engaged in women’s issues and women with an immigrant background. This paper presents and discusses our method and the women’s visions of the city that we have collected. Our aim is to contribute to the debate on how can we move towards creating democratic cities where both women and men – regardless of age, race, class, handicap and sexuality – have the same opportunities to participate in and influence the processes shaping the city.
3The paper is structured as follows: it begins with a discussion of the concept of the democratic city and then considers the city as gendered space. This leads into our visions methodology using feminist Utopias in imagining alternatives and of focus groups as a way of collecting women’s visions of the city as a good place. The final part of the paper presents and discusses some of these visions of the city.
THE DEMOCRATIC CITY
4In a democratic city, the right to the city (both its public and private places) should, theoretically, be the same for everyone regardless of sex, ethnicity, sexual proclivity, disability and so forth. A democratic city should also mean the same possibilities to influence how the city is shaped – both in a physical and in an emotional way – regardless of the kind of democratic ideal chosen. However, as women, we are surrounded by ‘voices’ (the media, the police) telling us that, female bodies moving in urban space, in public places are provocative, that they do not belong there – especially without the protective escort of a man. There has been a clear message since the ancient Greeks that the city belongs to men (see for example, Thucydides writing ca 471 – 400 BC). Women’s place is seen as in the private, the domestic realm. Yet, paradoxically, it is in the place where women are supposed to be ‘at home’, to be safe i.e. in the privacy of the domestic space that women are most subjected to violence (Wendt Höjer, 2002). Eduards argues that democracy for women involves not only economic independence and political influence but also bodily integrity and views the latter as essential for « the foundation of an egalitarian social order » (Eduards, 1997: 23). Whilst the city has been significant in promoting the first aspect (by providing educational and employment opportunities) and to some extent the second, much remains to be done with regard to the third. As long as women lack the fundamental right to their own bodies, then it is difficult to talk about a functioning democratic order (Wendt Höjer, 2002) or equal citizenship for women and men (Lister, 2003). Accordingly, for us the democratic city encompasses women’s right to feel at home, safe and to be able to influence both the city’s private and public spaces i. e. the right to bodily integrity becomes a crucial prerequisite for a democratic city (see also Eduards, 2002, Gustafsson et al.; 1997, Lister, 2003).
5Leonie Sandercock (1997, 2003) has developed the concept of urban citizenship as everyday practices and everyday life in the city which involves both rights and responsibilities. These rights include the right to the city which, she argues, includes perceptions of welcome and safety in every corner of the city, and the right to participate in the decisions that shape the city as a home. Attached to her concept of citizenship is a responsibility for extending these rights to fellow citizens as well as a responsibility to participate and to have a civic ethic of caring for and sharing the common living space. We would add to her concept of citizenship, the right to feel welcome, safe and able to influence even the private living space (see also Lister, 2003).
THE CITY AS GENDERED SPACE
6The city is a physical place. It is bricks and mortar, the concrete infrastructure of buildings, roads, squares and parks and how these are designed, organized and related to each other. Yet the city is more than just the physical, it is also an emotional space. It is about feelings of being welcome, belonging, included and unafraid (regardless of whether one is a woman or a man) or of being unwelcome, excluded, afraid, marginalized. It is about experiencing and living the city in different ways. It is about being able to influence the processes of the city or not. The city through its space, its architecture, its social relations, its gendered activities produces and reproduces the structures of power in society. As Lefebvre (1991) argues, space is socially produced in ways that often appear neutral and abstract, but which are in fact partial and political.
7Markus (2002) suggests that all built space inevitably structures social relationships by, for example, creating ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’ and categories of ‘inhabitants’, ‘visitors’, and ‘strangers’. It also separates those with power from those who lack power. « In other words all space is political » (Markus, 2002: 17). This is reiterated by Bingham et al (2002) who point out the importance of articulating the relationship between architecture, embodiment and gender and that the organization of space shapes the way bodies can move. Certain ways of being are enabled or facilitated while others are constrained or prevented. Spaces are ordered so as to facilitate social relations. Indeed Grosz (1996) argues that the city’s form and structure provide the context in which social rules and expectations are internalized in order to ensure social conformity and this makes it necessary to see the city as the concrete locus for the production and circulation of power. « The features of space are made to appear visible or invisible, bounded or porous, according to a set of subtly reinforced beliefs which organize our perceptions of the physical world. We understand these special ‘facts’ simply to ‘be’ and not only to be but to be obvious. » (Bingham et al., 2002: 4.) Thus, we accept certain ways of organizing and structuring the city as natural, as neutral processes and in this way the gendered power relations remain hidden.
8This has meant that women, as a group, their varying experiences and needs have largely been omitted, resulting in cities that are often wanting in both functional and safety terms. For example, the physical planning of space and land use is based on gender blind assumptions, and analyses of women’s and men’s living conditions are lacking (see Berntsson, 1996; Lundkvist, 1998, Friberg & Larsson, 2000). Women’s participation in planning processes is generally limited and their contribution marginalized or de-legitimized (Lennie, 1999). The concept of zoning i. e. dividing the city into areas for housing, industry, offices and so on has been based on, and has emphasized, stereotype gender roles (Friberg & Larsson, 1999) with the man as the breadwinner commuting to work daily while the woman is relegated to the home. This has created a « dichotomy » between a « public » sphere of male dominated production activities, wage labour and political life and a « private » sphere of female domestic activity, unpaid labour in the home and everyday life (see Clarke et al., 1995). Although there are complex relations between « the public » and « the private » and that we acknowledge the risk of reproducing this traditional dichotomy, we still believe this distinction to be valid when discussing and analysing the positions of women and men in the city.
9The physical separation of functions into different zones frequently has negative consequences for women in terms of daily living. Even in the Scandinavian countries, often described as « more gender equal » compared with other western countries, women still tend to retain primary responsibility for children and other dependent family members. This often limits their work opportunities to jobs close to residential locations or else forces them to traverse large spans of city space each day between home, child care, work, shopping and so on (Young, 1990).
10A further negative aspect of urban living is the risk for and the fear of sexual assault in public places (see, for example, Listerborn, 2001; Livholts & Bränström Öhman, 2002; Friberg & Larsson, 1999). The way in which this fear can curtail women’s freedom of movement and limit their use of public space is well documented (see Pain, 2001, Listerborn, 1999, 2001, Lundkvist, 1998). Women are (or feel themselves) excluded from certain parts of cities even during daylight hours. Street lighting, the positioning and layout of buildings, open spaces, underpasses and so on are often inadequately or inappropriately planned and designed from the point of view of safety largely because women have never been party to their design and planning. However, it is important to point out that it is not the physical environment itself that threatens women; fear is embedded in the gendered power relations in society where women as a group are subordinate to men as a group. Fear cannot be « designed away ». Improving street lighting or building footbridges instead of tunnels will not solve the root causes of women’s fear in public places. These lie in the unequal gendered power structures in society, where men’s violence against women and women’s fear of that violence play an important role in maintaining these unequal relations (Wendt Höjer, 2002). Nevertheless, there is a spatial dimension to fear and studies have shown that women are more afraid in certain locations or avoid certain places because they consider that these are associated with greater risk e.g. underpasses under roads and railways, badly lit parks, dark alleyways, etc. (see Heber, 2005 for an overview).
11Although statistics show that women are at greater risk from violence in the home, their fear of assault in public places is greater than men’s (Pain, 2001; Day, 2001). However, the construction of feminine gender identities often emphasizes women’s bodily vulnerability and reinforces the idea of public space as dangerous for women (Livholts & Bränström Öhman, 2002). This can serve to reinforce the image of women as passive victims rather than as active agents of change and circumscribe their citizenship (Lister, 2003). Indeed Day (2001) suggests that fear and the perception of danger may encourage women to adhere to gendered social norms for behaviour that restrict their independence in public space. However, women are not necessarily merely passive recipients of the city. They actively produce, define and reclaim space through their everyday practices and routinized uses of space. They develop strategies for negotiating the city; defying the gendered power relationships and « walking boldly » (cf. Koskela, 1997).
IMAGINING ALTERNATIVES
12Deutsch (2000) suggests that spaces are always endowed with multiple meanings and that the contested meanings of space and place add another dimension to the city’s configurations of power. Listerborn (1999) argues the subject who is able to define and decide the use of places has the power to own the space.
13If « we » have a subordinate position, how can « we » negotiate spaces that are constructed by others? The processes discussed above create subject positions for women as the Other, as vulnerable, as ‘out of place’ in the public, although these subjects positions vary between different groups of women related to ethnicity/ race, class, sexuality, age, disability and so on. Our subject positions affect our ability to imagine alternative cities. The woman-made city does not exist. How can we then imagine an alternative to the constrictive and discriminatory spaces of the present? It has been argued that a « city designed by women » would be radically different from present cities (Beavis 1997), but in what way(s)? How might women defy the city’s gendered power relationships and actively take part in producing urban space rather than passively experiencing it?
14We decided to use feminist Utopias of the city as a way to stimulate women’s thinking about alternatives. Our ambition was to « free the mind » by presenting transgressing alternatives of thinking of the constructions of women and men in the city. A problem we experienced in searching for suitable texts was that the city often tended to be seen as dystopia standing for patriarchal destruction, whilst utopia was reserved for idyllic, rural settings. We did, however, find a few city based utopia. One of these, Pamela Sargent’s The Shore of Women, had been translated into Swedish (Kvinnokusten). This is set in the future following a nuclear disaster which more women than men survived. A new world is built based on walled cities inhabited only by women whilst men are forced to roam the wilderness outside the cities. Women control all science and technology, and have, for example, developed a public transport system that takes you swiftly to wherever you want to go in the city. Much of the drudgery of housework is solved through collective living and eating. There is a sense that women can do what ever they set their minds to and have whatever trades, occupations and skills they want.
15The second example we used was taken from history. Medieval Beguinages, walled enclaves where only women were allowed to live, were found in a number of cities in present day Belgian and the Netherlands in the period 1 200 – 1 500 (Hudson, 2005; Walter, 2001). They developed in a period when the cities in Low Countries were growing rapidly and there was a shortage of labour power. Women moved from the countryside to the cities looking for work in greater numbers than men. Cities were often ‘dangerous’ for women on their own and Beguinage represented a safe haven. No men were allowed to live there or visit after nightfall when the gates were closed and women could wander the streets without fear of assault. The final text we used was from the feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young. She develops an ideal of city life as a vision of social relations affirming group difference. In her vision of the ideal city she presents four central characteristics for the city: social differentiation without exclusion (city politics must take account of and provide a voice for different groups living in the city at the same time as borders are open between groups); variety differentiation of social space which also helps to make the city safer because people are out on the streets most hours); eroticism (in the sense of meeting the Other, encountering, the novel, the strange and the unexpected in both the people and the buildings); and publicity (in the sense that cities provide public space where people can meet and appreciate diverse cultural expressions that they do not share or fully understand) (Young, 1990: 240-241).
FOCUS GROUPS
16We used focus groups as a way to collect women’s visions of the city as a good place. As moderators, we introduced the topic and presented our material on feminist utopia as a stimulus for discussion and then played a passive role, only intervening if the discussion floundered or strayed too far from the original subject. The participants were chosen in line with the aims of the project and formed homogeneous groups in the sense that we included only women and the women in the respective groups had the same ‘profession’. Women use the city in different ways depending on their job, their ethnicity, age, their family status e.g. whether or not they have children, disability and so on. We selected four groups relating to their employment. These were women with their own small businesses; women working with women’s issues (e.g. women’s refuges); women working in the health and social services and immigrant women. The women within the groups varied with respect to age, family status, social status and handicap.
17We tried to ensure that the women in each group had something in common (e.g. employment area) and that everyone knew at least one other person in the group as it is usually easier to get people to exchange and discuss ideas and opinions if they feel they have something in common and are confident in the group (see Wibeck, 2000). We carried out focus group interviews with each of these groups in both Norrköping and Umeå (i.e. 4 groups in each city). There were between 6-7 women in each group as this was considered an appropriate size (a large group increases the risk that some will not participate in the discussion). The interviews were recorded in a locale where the participants felt ‘at home’. This was considered important for the validity of the results. The participants would be less intimidated than if the meeting was held in a university environment, would feel freer to speak and less likely to say what they thought we, the researchers, wanted to hear.
WOMEN’S VISIONS OF THE CITY
18The focus group interviews were conducted in two cities, Norrköping and Umeå. These are of similar size (110, 000 and 130, 000 population respectively) and in both cases have slightly more women than men. Umeå is, however, an administrative centre whereas Norrköping is a more typical industrial city. In the focus groups, women’s discussions moved between the city as a public place and as a private space, reflecting that the city is not just about concrete forms and buildings but is also about social relations, values and attitudes. In our analysis of the interviews, we identify a number of themes relating to both the public and private aspects of the city. We are aware that this public/private dichotomy is problematic and that we need to exercise care so that it does not inhibit our understanding of the way(s) in which women conceive space and organize themselves spatially « into realms of autonomy and dependence » (Deutsch, 2000: 288).
19In this presentation, we have mainly focused on common trends in the material and we have also tried to highlight both the women’s more practical experiences and values of how the city is shaped and their emotional expressions of their feelings for the city.
THE CITY’S PRIVATE REALM
20The ideas of ‘separatism’ i. e. women-only urban and domestic space and communal living contained in the texts on utopia invoked discussions in several of the groups on alternative forms of housing. A number of women drew on previous experiences of living in collective houses in other cities. They considered that communal living helped to combat some of the drudgery of housework and cooking and improve sharing of domestic tasks between men and women. A number of women reminisced nostalgically on experiences of ‘cooking collectives’ in Umeå in the 1970s where responsibility for preparing a joint meal one day a week for the other families in the collective rotated between members. Others enlarged on the possibilities communal living provided for extending the traditional nuclear family and breaking the isolation of women making it more difficult to conceal violence against women. These ideas were developed most in the focus groups working with women’s issues in both cities. These women have to deal with the effects of men’s violence in their daily work and are perhaps, therefore, most eager to find alternatives. Although all the other groups, also took up ideas of the city providing and/or encouraging forms of collective living. The possibility of non-sexist housing design was also raised and a range of living patterns and spaces was sought after, not just those restricted to the nuclear family and individual dwellings.
THE CITY’S PUBLIC REALM
IMPORTANCE OF THE NEIGHBOURHOOD
21The tendency even in so-called ‘gender-equal’ Sweden for women to retain the primary responsibility for the family and the home is reflected in the discussions on the local neighbourhood. Many of the comments reflected the need for holistic thinking to tie together fragmented everyday living – that the different aspects of life should not be compartmentalized and separated from each other. Ideas concerning a multifunctional neighbourhood, where different functions such as housing, work places, shopping, day care and elderly care are integrated, were raised in all the groups. Several women voiced concerns over how the continuing separation of functions into single use zones added to the burden of daily life creating tiring criss-cross journeys and emphasized the importance of proximity between uses. Critical views were expressed on segregated developments, for example, out of town shopping centres which make it difficult not only for those without a car to use them but also contribute to the disappearance of the neighbourhood centre with its important social network and contact functions. The increasing scale of everything and the problems for small businesses to compete were taken up not just by women with small businesses. The need for meeting places, for both spontaneous and planned encounters, for variety and ‘colour’ in living areas was also emphasized. The importance of being able to influence the neighbourhood where one lives was also stressed. This is illustrated by two women, friends, both working in the caring services and living in neighbouring blocks of flats in Norrköping, who described very different experiences of belonging and thriving in their local environment. One spoke enviously of how the other was able to influence the use of common spaces within and adjoining her building. The other spoke of the importance of seeing the neighbourhood as always in a process of becoming, as continually changing as new people move in, as needs change, as children grow up, as people get older and so on, and how she enjoyed living there, how she felt ‘at home’ in her neighbourhood. The importance of having a mishmash of uses was also referred to in relation to generating security and identity. It was important for women that their neighbourhood was safe for both them and their families. Play areas for children away from trafficked roads and possible to keep an eye on from kitchen windows whilst preparing meals was one concrete suggestion. Leisure time activities for young people to keep them occupied and stop them getting into trouble. Good public transport access and well lit pedestrian and cycle roads close to housing rather than through parks and woods were mentioned reflecting that women tend to have less access to cars and walk and cycle more than men in both cities.
SAFETY AND FEAR
22Another recurring theme in the discussions concerned safety in the city. In recent years, both cities have experience of brutal rapes resulting in murder in Norrköping and attempted murder in Umeå. This has set its mark very clearly. Women in all groups talked about being afraid. There was a feeling of lost innocence and a new awareness of the dangers of the city. Many talked in terms of that they had not been afraid to walk home alone late at night when they were younger, but now they were much more cautious. Those who had daughters or nieces or friends with young daughters were afraid for them – that in the rashness of youth they might take unnecessary risks. They talked about telling them – « take a taxi – I’ll pay! » At the same time they were aware that their sons were probably at greater risk of being attacked. Women with teenage sons talked about their fears for their safety when they were walking home late at night and the problem of their sons’ apparent lack of fear.
23Cutbacks in the welfare state were also mentioned as leading to greater insecurity. One woman working in healthcare services said as a consequence of reforms affecting mental health patients « I’m more afraid now because I know how many ticking bombs there are out there! » Some women confessed that they no longer went out alone after 9 o’clock at night whereas others described how much energy they put into developing strategies for negotiating the city in safety. How they chose their routes with care avoiding dark or lonely places, walking with their keys in their fist, an alarm in their pocket or a number programmed into their mobile phone ready to press if anything should happen. There was discussion of developing the right tactics for meeting men in the street, not looking directly at him in case this was construed as a ‘come-on’, but also not looking away as this might be seen as a sign of fear (and thus vulnerability). There were also strong feelings of anger. Anger that they should have to be afraid, that their possibility to use and enjoy the city was being curtailed. There was anger at the police’s, politician’s and the press’s warnings and admonishments to women to stay at home. Several pointed out that – aside from the question of women’s right to enjoy the city in the same way as men – this ignored the fact that many women work unsocial hours (nurses, shift workers in factories, cleaners) often without assess to cars and frequently have to take themselves home late at night or in the early hours of the morning. « If there was a curfew on men, then it wouldn’t be a problem for women to be out at night! »
24Both physical and psychological aspects of safety were taken up and a hardening of attitudes towards women. A number of women linked this to the problem of the sexualization of the public space and how this subjugates women, objectifying them and representing them as ‘fair game’ for men’s desires. Discussion revolved around how this creating feelings of exclusion, of not being welcome in parts of the city. One woman described vividly standing alone, one dark night, at a bus shelter adorned with a semi-pornographic advertisement for women’s underclothes and the feelings of distaste, humiliation, vulnerability and objectification she experienced – that she too – by proxy of also being a women – was ‘for sale’. Others took up the increasing violence in the city and related it to the Americanization of society and a weakening of the traditional Swedish value of solidarity. The form of the city and the increasing segregation of uses were also discussed in terms of safety. An example from Umeå related to the forced removal of small summer cottages from around a large lake (10 kilometres in circumference) on the grounds of improving public access can illustrate this point. In the words of one woman « How did this improve accessibility? You could walk round the lake before. Now I feel less secure there. Before it was comforting to know that if anything happen – if I tripped and twisted my ankle -there was someone nearby to help. » In contrast a women in Norrköping said that she now felt safer returning home at night after a gym had opened nearby as this meant that there were people coming and going even quite late at night.
BELONGING AND IDENTITY
25Ideas were expressed concerning feelings of belonging and identity – of having the right to be there – in relation to discussions of environments where the women in the focus groups felt safe contra those where they felt insecure and afraid. A young participant in one group in Norrköping described how she had just moved into her own first flat and her feelings of excitement and trepidation. However, her trepidation was countered by the fact that she had moved back to the street she grew up on – where she felt at home and secure in the familiar environment. Many women took up the importance of more human scale – this was often connected to the importance of being able to see and be seen, to hear and be heard. In this respect the importance of the way housing is designed was taken up, for example, that buildings did not turn their backs to the street or that there were not just garages on the ground floor, and the way areas were connected to each other. A number of women confessed that they risked running over the road rather than using underpasses even during the day. In one of the focus groups of women working in the caring services, the conviction emerged that the city could steer more in terms of encouraging mixed uses in neighbourhoods and limiting large-scale shopping enterprises if it valued the side benefits from more small scale, varied uses in terms of better safety, less vandalism, more social contacts – ‘soft values’. But « all the city is concerned about is being bigger, producing flashy shopping centres and so on so it can compete with other cities ».
26Women in the focus groups were not particularly impressed by grandiose schemes or phallic symbols. This was particularly apparent in Umeå where the redevelopment proposals for the area known as « the city between the bridges » has involved vast skyscrapers (considered out of scale with the rest of the city) and large areas of parks (considered out of keeping with the climate). As one woman commenting the winning proposal – a twenty storey conference/hotel centre on an artificial island in the middle of the river – said « Have they (the architects) been to Umeå in the winter? (The city is covered in snow for six months of the year) Who will be able to use all that parkland? Have they felt how the wind blows down by the river? » Another woman, a small business owner, took up the waste of the existing buildings « Why knock down attractive old buildings by the quay when there is a crying need for premises for small businesses in the city? » All agreed that the present use of the area was unsatisfactory, but their ideas circulated around finding new uses for the existing buildings as restaurants, cafes, small workshops, facilities for young people (there is a shortage of these in the city). The idea was raised of appointing catalysts to encourage and help small business to locate there, but also for ‘social’ catalysts to ‘coax’ people to use the city’s attractions and to encourage the development of local centres and greater diversity.
DEMOCRATIC PLANNING AND POLICY FORMULATION PROCESSES
27In both cities, women discussed the importance of accessible (both physically and psychologically) structures and procedures in the city. One example was the need to develop more sensitive transport planning that pays better regard to women’s varying needs as workers, as young mothers, as disabled, as elderly and so on. As one woman, herself disabled, said « I always travel by bus, mainly with other women, but I have never been asked what I think about the bus service and I haven’t met any other women who have been asked either! » There was a general feeling that greater efforts were needed to ensure that women regardless of age, disability, education and so on, as well as other excluded groups were better included in the city’s planning and policy making processes as part of an open dialogue. Even business women who were more used to dealing with authorities felt it was often difficult for women to access these processes, and immigrant women emphasized that it was particularly difficult for those who had not fully mastered Swedish. Improvements in this respect were seen as necessary if the gendered power relationships in the city were to be changed. In both cities, women mentioned the importance of committed female politicians chairing planning committees in helping to bring about improvements in creating safer cities for women. Nevertheless, many felt that more locally accessible ‘entrances’ (preferably with childcare facilities) to municipal planning were needed to enable both women and men – regardless of age, race, class, handicap and sexuality – to have the same opportunities to participate in and influence the processes shaping not only their neighbourhood but also the city more generally. The idea was also expressed that it was important that the issue of gender is recognized in the city – that this permeates all aspects of life. As one mother took up – « gender equality must involve both girls and boys. In school, when the girls have separate activities to build up their self-confidence, the boys do nothing – this signals that gender equality is a ‘girl’s thing’. Boys need to work with their roles as males – otherwise nothing will change! »
28We have concentrated on the commonalities between the focus groups, but even so it is possible to discern that there are variations in the way the city is lived, experienced and imagined – that there are different maps of meaning, different perceptions of the city among the women participating in our study. Although the cities they envisioned might not look very different physically from present cities – perhaps smaller scale, more multifunctional, with better street lighting and public transport, there would be important differences with regard to the city as an emotional space. A more welcoming, secure environment encouraging and valuing ‘soft’ values relating to solidarity, caring and friendship was prioritized. It would also be a more participatory city with a more open dialogue encouraging its citizens’ active involvement in the policy creating and plan producing stages rather than as the passive recipients of ready formulated plans and policies.
29It is important to stress here how the relationship between the physical and the emotional space of the city stands out in the focus groups. Feelings of fear have everything to do with the possibilities to influence society. Of course, increased political agency for women – and other groups constructed as « minorities » -could not stop rapists such as « Haga manen » in Umeå, but it could stop the media and the police from reproducing women as passive victims in a society dominated by men.
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Auteurs
-
Christine Hudson
Associate Professor
Umeå University -
Malin Rönnblom
Centre for Women’s Studies Umeå
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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