The Inclusive City
What do people need from their cities and what kind of democracy can deliver what they need?
For at least 200 years architects have argued over the political meaning of architecture. How much does the built environment shape our politics? How much does our politics shape our architecture? We know there must be some influence, but we also know it must be subtle, since the politics of a city changes much faster than its overall stock of buildings. Any one building can be torn down and replaced, or left standing but internally modified, yet the city is not much changed by any one such alteration. Systems of transport are more fundamental to the life of the city: roads, ports, subway, trains, helicopter landing pads. This transportation infrastructure changes more slowly than any one building might.
Some people devote their whole lives to studying the questions of urbanism and politics. In this essay I’ll go over the book “The Feminist City” by Leslie Kern, 2016. There are two separate avenues to explore here, one involves the ideas of Kern and the other involves the question of how society should make use of someone like Kern. To the extent that Kern is someone with rare knowledge, how do we bring her knowledge to bear on the problems we face today? She is a specialist, so we should ask how can democracy make use of her specialty? To use the language I developed in an earlier essay, she is dexio (Greek for “skill”), so how is her skill best balanced against the “demo?” We live in a world full of specialists, is it possible to find an ideal balancing of specialists and democracy, a “demodexio?” (Please see what I wrote in “In our highly specialized and complex world, all real political power needs to move to specialized committees.”)
What we should consider when we consider the places that people live
How long does it take to get to work? Can you walk there? Can you take mass transit? Do you need to use a car?
How long does it take to get to a grocery store?
How long does it take to get to the home of your best friend?
How long does it take to get your children’s to school?
If you think of yourself as an independent, autonomous human being who can re-invent themselves every day, you are surely correct in some sense, but it might be worthwhile to take a moment and consider how much your choices are shaped by choices others have made, sometimes in the distant past.
Kern is especially focused on the issue of cities being built by men and for men, and in particular, being built by healthy men for healthy men. But what about children? What about playgrounds? What about the specific needs of sustaining a family, which women handle more often than men? What about easy access to doctor’s offices?
Kern writes:
A geographic perspective on gender offers a way of understanding how sexism functions on the ground. Women’s second-class status is enforced not just through the metaphorical notion of “separate spheres,” but through an actual, material geography of exclusion… As feminist geographer Jane Darke says in one of my favourite quotes: “Any settlement is an inscription in space of the social relations in the socity that built it….Our cities are patriarchy written in stone, brick, glass and concrete.”
Patriarchy written in stone. This simple statement of the fact that built environments reflect the societies that construct them might seem obvious. In a world where everything from medication to crash test dummies, bullet-proof vests to kitchen counters, smartphones to office temperatures, are designed, tested, and set to standards determined by men’s bodies and needs, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The director of urban design for Toronto, Lorna Day, recently found that the city’s guidelines for wind effects assumed a “standard person” whose height, weight, and surface area corresponded to an adult male. You’d never think that gender bias influences the height and position of skyscrapers or the development of a wind tunnel, but there you have it.
What sometimes seems even less obvious is the inverse: that once built, our cities continue to shape and influence social relations, power, inequality, and so on. Stone, brick, glass, and concrete don’t have agency, do they? They aren’t consciously trying to uphold patriarchy, are they? No, but their form helps shape the range of possibilities for individuals and groups. Their form helps keep some things seeming normal and right, and others “out of place” and wrong. In short, physical places like cities matter when we want to think about social change.
On this Substack I’ve written a dozen essays suggesting that our democracy should show more respect for the long-term majority and less respect for the short-term majority. Cities are one of the few places where we are actually forced to do this. No current majority can completely re-write the city, so the city is forced to live with decisions made long ago, by majorities that are now dead.
Every human activity suggests all other human activities. Archeologists take evidence of humans in a location as meaning that everything implied by human culture must have existed in that place, at that time. But what is common in some cultures is shocking in others. To take a current issue, in some cultures it seems entirely normal for women to nurse their babies in public, while in other cultures it is treated by some as something shocking. In any era we learn the limits of human possibility by looking around us and seeing what others do. So how can we doubt that our thinking is influenced by human built geography? When we look around and see a city, we are looking at what humans thought of as normal, at some point in the past. But we may not want to go into the future still thinking of any particular type of city as normal.
Is it possible that we are influenced by decisions made thousands of years ago? We know this is true in some areas, for instance, the early Babylonians had a system of math that was base 60 instead of base 10, which is why we now divide a circle into 360 degrees instead of a 100 degrees. If you change your mind on a subject, you might tell a friend, "I've done a 180 on this issue." You wouldn't say, "I've done a 50 on this issue." And the reason why we use this idiom is because of some decisions the early priests and merchants made, more than 3,000 years ago.
The radical breaks in human thought fascinate us because they show us how much radical change is possible, and over what scales of time. A surprising example might be the earliest architecture in Europe. Our species, homo sapiens, arrived in Europe 40,000 years ago and almost immediately began building little villages that still make sense to us. It's a shock that they had certain intuitions about the use of space that still make sense to us even now. But 400,000 years ago a different kind of human, homo heidelbergensis, built a cute little village in France, but the architecture of this village does not make sense to us: small huts surrounding a giant long, thin building, 15 meters long but less than 3 meters wide. Why would anyone build a structure with such odd dimensions? What role did it play in the village? Yet no doubt that architecture communicated to the residents of that village certain ideals regarding what they should accept as normal.
Therefore, we should never doubt how much we are being influenced by cultural habits that go far back in time, habits we grew up with and therefore accept as natural, while at the same time, our culture is still being shaped by the structures and infrastructure we built in the past. Therefore, we should not doubt that the structure of our current cities sends a message about gender. If you walk through a city and nothing seems amiss, perhaps you are in the demographic the city was designed for? But what does the city feel like if you are not in that lucky demographic?
Kern emphasizes the extent that the needs of women and children were not considered in the previous designs of the city, and this effects the choices that women have to make today, but she also emphasizes the accidental and indirect way the decisions of the past shape the decisions that people make today.
Page 32-36
Post-war propaganda was explicit about the need for women to relinquish their wartime factory jobs to returning men and the suburban home was the perfect “fix” for re-establishing normative gender roles. By providing a spatial solution to the temporary widening of women’s horizons, the public-private, paid-unpaid work divide could be “naturally” re-established between the sexes.
The suburban lifestyle both assumed and required, in order to function properly, a heterosexual nuclear family with one adult working outside the home and one inside. Large houses, isolated from transit and other services, meant the stay-at-home wife and mother was required to perform a full-time domestic caretaker role, overseeing the home and managing the needs of the breadwinner and children. As feminst planner Sherilyn MacGregor states, this built form has “created a lasting infrastructure for the [gendered] division of labour,” one that pre-supposes the traditional heterosexual nuclear family.
…During one of my not-infrequent rants about this, a friend accused me of giving the suburbs “too much agency” in this example. So let me clarify: the suburbs are not consciously trying to keep women in the kitchen and out of the workplace, but given the assumptions they rest upon, the suburbs will actively (if not agentically) stymie attempts to manage different family shapes and working lives. The isolation, size of the family home, need for multiple vehicles, and demands of child care continue to push women either out of the workplace or into lower-paying, part-time jobs that mostly allow them to juggle the responsibilities of suburban life. It’s rarely the male breadwinner’s career that is sacrificed or downsized. After all, given the long-standing gender pay gap, it makes no sense to limit the man’s earning potential. In this way, the suburbs continue to support and naturalize certain kinds of gender roles in the heterosexual family and in the labour market.
I’ve several criticisms of Kern’s book, above all, she does not offer any solutions the problems that she diagnoses. Other than spending a bit more on mass transit and thinking more about what women and children need, she is mute on the subject how to fix things. But her book is insightful as a work of pure advocacy. Kern is at her best when she simply describes problems she faced in her own life as a mother.
When I became a mum, I quickly realized that using public transit with a baby stroller in London was a joke. Although a lot of Tube stations have elevators because the stations are so deep underground, only fifty out of two-hundred and seventy stations are accessible. Curved staircases, random steps, steep escalators, sharp turns, narrow tunnels, and of course thousands of commuters and tourists make navigating the system an adventure. One of our first big outings with newborn Maddy was to a baby show (like a home show, but with baby stuff). We had a big comfy pram, of the kind still common in the U.K. and Europe, that we’d found at a charity shop. It might as well have been a spaceship, that’s how out of place it was on our journey. That was the first and last time we used the pram. We learned that the only accessible way to navigate the city with a baby was with her in a carrier.
…Reminiscing about those early years of parenting in my gentrifying neighbourhood doesn’t evoke a sense of ease. In fact, it evokes a deep bodily sense of exhaustion. Sure, lack of sleep is typical for new parents. What I’m referring to is the physical exertion of intensive parenting in the city. I picture my younger self, pushing a plastic-wheeled stroller across sidewalks and streets choked with snow and ice. Loading the stroller full of groceries several times a week because we didn’t have a car. Note: this is supposed to be one of the “convenient” parts of city living. Half-carrying, half-dragging that stroller home because a wheel would disintegrate after taking a battering on pocked pavements. Multiple daily trips to the park, a literacy drop-in, or a community centre play space to fulfill my daughter’s “need” for enriching, sociable, exciting activities. Evening transit trips to swimming lessons downtown. The constant back and forth to day care, school, errands, lessons, visits to family and friends. I want to go back in time and tell myself: stay home. Lie down. Do less.
Kern’s book suggest the need for another kind of book, an engineering book, with specific ideas that might concretely address some of the problems she raises. And there needs to be more thought given to those problems which can be solved purely with an engineering approach, versus those problems which require political solutions.
Let’s consider political solutions, and then engineering solutions:
Can mixed-use zoning help mothers with kids? Some neighborhoods have a thousand regulations that are enforced by the property owners who feel those regulations boost the value of their property, but these regulations often have a deadening effect that make those neighborhoods unfriendly to live in unless one is wealthy enough to hire aides. Less regulations would probably make some neighborhoods more friendly to live in, and much of this friendliness would arise organically in the absence of the monoculture that is enforced with heavy-handed rules. A mixed-use neighborhood could ideally be a neighborhood where a mother can find everything she needs within 15 minutes of her house. (I already wrote about how much I enjoy living in a 15 minute city.)
Engineering, by itself, might help with some of the problems that Kern mentions. For instance, bathrooms. Filthy bathrooms are a source of conflict and have featured recently as a big part of the culture wars, especially regarding their use by trans individuals. And yet, it would be straightforward to build bathrooms that clean themselves automatically after each use. This would be a fairly simple and straightforward thing to automate. If paper products were kept sealed away (protected from water), and the rest of the bathroom was metal or ceramic, and if the drainage was good, then all exposed surfaces could be blasted with hot bleach between each use. Among other benefits, public bathrooms are a notorious vector for spreading disease, so keeping them sterile helps society in several ways.
“If the drainage is good” is a large qualifier — current standards for plumbing go back a century. We made huge progress in the late 1800s but we’ve hardly made any since. Building robust systems of drainage and sewage would address several problems that our society faces, from bathrooms to flooding. Capacity can be increased for each step of the process. Clogging could disappear as an issue. In computer programming (my profession) we have the saying “All problems of software engineering can be solved by another layer indirection” (Butler Lampson, 1972). The same is true with bathrooms: if women often clog toilets by trying to flush away sanitary products then we can either scold women or we can an introduce another layer of indirection to make sure no sanitary product can clog the plumbing. We could easily introduce something like a giant garbage disposal unit that would grind up anything people try to flush, so that nothing solid can possibly reach the pipes. A professional plumber might have better ideas than I do, but the key point is that this is an area where engineering solutions could fix a great deal.
(There is also the issue of the West still using toilet paper when the rest of the world has moved on to bidets. Again, in the late 1800s, the West lead the world in inventing modern hygiene, but then the West stagnated. When Americans first had clean indoor bathrooms, peasants in Japan were still dying of intestinal worms they got because they were using their own manure as fertilizer in the fields. But when Japan finally caught up, it quickly surpassed the West and established a higher level standard for hygiene. The Western system of toilet paper works well for healthy people but as soon as someone has a broken arm or severe back pain or diarrhea the advantage of using a bidet becomes apparent.)
As much as some people try to run away from this, the reality is that people have bodies and bodies have needs, and building a space for humans means building a space for human bodies, with all of their many needs.
Page 106-107
Like a lot of other issues, bathroom access became visible to me as an urban concern when I had an infant and then a toilet-training toddler in tow. I quickly learned that department stores were our best bet for emergency diaper changes, spots to nurse, and a decent level of cleanliness and provisioning. As spaces built with the comfort of women in mind, department stores, while not always explicitly set up to best serve mothers, were spaces where the bathrooms were likely to be spacious, have lots of stalls, be elevator or escalator accessible, have a chair one could sit in to nurse, offer baby changing stations, be a safe space to leave a stroller outside, and so on. On particularly messy outings, they were also places I could buy a quick change of clothes to replace a poop-splattered onesie. In fact, department stores remain my go-to places to “go” whether I have a kid with me or not. Unfortunately, urban department stores are disappearing, and with them their comfortable and accessible bathrooms.
…My university residence had co-ed multi-stall washrooms and shower facilities back in the 1990s. It took a day or two to get used to the sight of a dude strolling up to the sink in boxers or coming out of the shower stall. The few problems we had couldn’t be attributed to gender differences. The gender of the person who pooped on the floor right next to the toilet one long weekend was never discovered, for example. Yet this kind of fully desegregated arrangement remains extremely rare. Binary gender segregated washrooms are the norm, and the formal and informal policing of who enters such space means that trans folks as well as anyone else who doesn’t conform to strict gender norms approaches this basic daily need with stress, fear, and the looming threat of harassment and violence.
Kern is apparently comfortable writing a book of pure advocacy though she acknowledges in the book that advocacy has not lead to improvements and, in fact, in some ways things have gotten worse despite an abundance of excellent feminist advocacy aiming to make things better.
Yet, many decades after trenchant critiques, the same problems remain. Under neoliberalism, most of the “solutions” generated for those problems have been market-based, meaning they require the ability to pay for extra services, conveniences, and someone else’s underpaid labour. Very few changes, especially in North American cities, have re-imagined and re-worked the built environment and other aspects of urban infrastructure in ways that take care-work seriously.
Here Kern touches upon the issue that is the main focus of everything I write here on this Substack: why doesn’t democracy lead to responsive government. Which should lead to the question, what changes in the design of our democracy might lead to a system that is more responsive to the actual needs of the people?
Kern does briefly mention a political urbanist movement that has gained some momentum in Europe, though she does not explore what allowed the movement to succeed in Europe. She seems to put all of her hopes in advocacy, the idea that a good idea can simply win on its own merits if enough people argue for it. But her own comments about the lack of traction that feminist critiques have had in the past should give us doubts whether advocacy by itself can give us the improvements that we hope to see.
Kern mentions “gender-mainstreaming” in the city of Vienna. This idea of “gender-mainstreaming” might have gained traction in Vienna because the dominant political parties in Austria have institutionalized Women’s Unions inside of the parties, and so women’s perspectives have a fixed, formalized process for making their needs known, even in the conservative Christian Democrats party. So Austria offers an excellent example of what I’ve suggested, that having specialized committees can help produced specific outcomes that better represent the needs of specific groups in society. On that subject (how the internal structure of political parties shapes the policies supported by those parties) I will soon review a great book by Sarah Elise Wiliarty, “The CDU and the Politics of Gender in Germany: Bringing Women to the Party.”
Kern wrote:
In Europe, “gender-mainstreaming” approaches to urban planning and budgetary decisions have a longer history. Essentially, these frameworks mean that every planning, policy, and budget decision has to be considered with the goal of gender equality as the departure point. For example, policymakers must ask how a decision will potentially enhance or undermine gender equality. These approaches push cities to consider how decisions support or stymie the care work that literally keeps society functioning.
The city of Vienna has adopted a gender mainstreaming approach in several areas, such as education and health care. But it has had a profound affect on urban planning. Echoing the experiences of women around the world, and my own experiences too, women responded to a 1999 transit survey with their stories of complex journeys balancing care and paid work: “I take my kids to the doctor some mornings, then bring them to school before I go to work. Later, I help my mother buy groceries and bring my kids home on the metro.” Transit use illustrated some of the vast discrepancies between men’s and women’s use of city services and spaces. Vienna attempted to meet this challenge by redesigning areas to facilitate pedestrian mobility and accessibility as well as improving public transport services. The city also created housing developments of the sort imagined by feminist designers, including on-site childcare, health services, and access to transit. With the objective of making sure that everyone has equal access to urban resources, Vienna’s gender mainstreaming approach is “literally reshaping the city.”
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Gender mainstreaming is slowly making its way into more cities. Recently, news media seemed amused to report that some Canadian and U.S. cities were using a gender analysis on their snowplow budgets and schedules. While it’s fair to say that snow doesn’t discriminate, decisions about which roads and areas to prioritize for clearance reveals a lot about which activities are valued in the city. In most cases, cities plow major roads leading to the central city first, leaving residential streets, sidewalks, and school zones until last. In contrast, cities like Stockholm have adopted a “gender equal plowing strategy” that instead prioritizes sidewalks, bike paths, bus lanes, and day care zones in recognition of the fact that women, children, and seniors are more likely to walk, bike, or use mass transit. Moreover, since kids need to be dropped off before work begins, it makes sense to clear these routes earlier. The vice mayor of Stockholm, Daniel Helldén, described the plan to Canadian media, arguing that instead of plowing in ways that reinforce car-centred behavior, Stockholm’s method encourages everyone to use alternative modes of transportation. Instead of replicating the status quo, their plan looks forward to “how you want your city to be.”
We need to consider three possibilities:
Gender mainstreaming is being enacted by city planners because of advocacy
Gender mainstreaming is being enacted by city planners because of dedicated Women’s committees
Gender mainstreaming is being enacted by city planners because of both advocacy and also because of specific Women’s committees.
Anyone who has read any of my essays knows that I am strongly allergic to any argument that suggests “This could work if only people would try a little harder.” I’m generally looking for changes in structures such that positive outcomes become automatic. While advocacy helps specialists learn about ideas related to their specialty, those specialists need political support to make those ideas a reality. And given sufficient political pressure, some policies would be adopted automatically, even in the absence of advocacy. Even if the city planners of Vienna had never heard of the idea of “gender mainstreaming” they would still be under pressure from the dedicated Women’s committees of their own political parties and so these city planners would still need to make cities more friendly to women. So, as you can imagine, I’m inclined to think that having dedicated committees is more important than advocacy. So, when we think about what our plan of action should be, we should focus our advocacy on ensuring the right committees get created, because if we can win that battle, then there are many other battles that we will win automatically.
Can the people solve their problems with pure willpower?
Aside from political solutions and engineering solutions, are there other ways to overcome the failures and flaws of our existing, built environment?
Here I will offer my strongest criticism of Kern. She suggests that cultural change, especially regarding friendship, might offer a path forward for radical change:
Page 85
Wunker insists that a focus on friendship has revolutionary potential. It defies patriarchal logics: “There are bodies with other bodies - laughing, crying, cooking, dancing, hugging - with no imperative to procreation or other reproductive labours. Friendship as counter to capitalist ideology. Friendship as its own economy.” Dakota scholar Kim TallBear suggests it might disrupt settler logics as well. TallBear speaks about hetero- and even homo-normativity as part of the structure of “settler sexuality”: ways of relating that value enforced monogamy, private property, and a particular set of relations with the state, which were imposed on Indigenous peoples and are part of the ongoing process of Indigenous dispossession. Settler sexuality is thus part of the framework that stabilizes and normalizes the colonial state. It also denigrates the value of many other ways of being “in relation,” including friendships, non-monogamy, relationships with the land, and relationships with non-humans. TallBear contends that these other ways of being in relation are profoundly destabilizing to colonial power structures.
…It’s a challenging question with a lot of roadblocks in the way of an answer. Friendship, such a central preoccupation of childhood and adolescence, isn’t taken as seriously in adulthood, and of course it exists in an informal and unstructured context. Unlike marriage, it’s not recognized by the state and there are no formal or legal bonds of friendship. This is probably as it should be, but even without a “friendship license,” adult friendships could be considered among the relationships and values important to the imagining of urban places. But it’s particularly difficult when friendship is always contrasted with and then diminished in relation to “legitimate” connection such as those cemented by marriage, blood, or sexual intimacy.
While friendship is great, it seems inconsistent for Kern to write a whole book about how the flaws of our existing, built environment gets in the way of work and play and shopping and leisure but somehow, despite all that, we can simply develop friendship as a revolutionary new force in our lives.
I’ve had many friends participate in Intentional Communities and I was at one time, myself, part of such communities. The best book on the subject is “Creating A Life Together” by Diane Leafe Christian. Please see what I wrote in Creating A Life Together: Practical Tools To Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities. My main point there is that idealists constantly underestimate the difficulties of trying to create meaningful community in defiance of the rest of the world, that is, in defiance of the economy, the law, pop culture, the need to make money, transportation, health, geography, retirement, that is, in defiance of many of the things that Kern herself has written about.
What is the limit of willpower? How much can a single individual live their life in defiance of the state and the masses? Institutions matter. Cultural movements can transform society to the extent that they are organized. Open a history book and you can read of new religious sects that bring about some dramatic transformation of society. In the early 1700s the British working class was destroyed by the gin epidemic, but those workers were then saved by John Wesley when he created the Methodist sect which enforced a strict ban on all alcohol consumption. The individual willpower of any particular member of the working class meant little against the crushing poverty and cruelty of that early industrial society, but an organized movement, with excellent leadership, was able to bring about a dramatic change for the better.
So this is my critique of Kern’s ideas about friendship: any two people who want to be friends will face difficulties for all of the reasons that Kern herself explained so eloquently in her book. If there is going to be a real effort to revive community and friendship, it would have to be done as a large-scale movement, with excellent leadership. Such a movement might be driven by a for-profit corporation, as MeetUp.com did for many years before the Covid-19 pandemic. Such a transformation needs an organization behind it, and that organization needs leadership and money, and then in turn it can provide the repeating rituals and common spaces that foster actual community.
Conclusion
Kern does an excellent job of delineating the flaws of our currently existing built environment, especially in the ways that it fails women and children. We need more specialists such as Kern who can advocate for policies that will make life better for women and children. However, mere advocacy will not give us the reforms that we want. We’ve already had 60 years of excellent feminist interrogations of the previously male-centered public society and, as Kern noted, in some ways things have gotten worse despite this abundance of excellent advocacy. To actually move forward, on this issue as with so many others, we need a kind of democracy that better empowers experts such as Kern to bring their insights to bear. As I said in earlier essays, the idea of an omnicompetent all-purpose legislature may have made sense in the 1700s but is woefully obsolete in the 21st Century. We must move towards a system where specialized committees, staffed by people like Kern, are better empowered to drive through the reforms that are needed.