Looking From the Margins and the Making of Feminist Urban Worlds

Abstract

The field of feminist urban geography has shed light on the workings of power and its spatial manifestation at multiple scales. Weaving across this scholarship, I show that it is motivated by concerns about systemic hierarchies, emphasizes looking from the margins, and highlights alternative, emancipatory possibilities. First, these works show how patriarchal logics underpin institutional spaces and shape social norms that govern urban life in violent ways. Second, feminist scholarship has shown how the everyday lives of those at the margins can challenge and subvert a dominant making of boundaries between the public and private, or local and global. Third, they articulate how strategies to attain urban belonging, structured around commoning, care, and a call for freedom, can offer alternatives for just futures. Through a grounded understanding of everyday practices, this scholarship shows the significance of temporality in world-making and complicates the notion of the urban as a site of aspiration. Moving forward, the field can be more attentive to how global urban margins hold promise in decentering power-knowledge networks and showcase the place of the urban within center-periphery relations. With this tool kit, feminist urban geography can provide provisional, conjectural possibilities to conceptualize more meaningful worlds.