Leslie Kern’s Feminist City: You’ll never look at your city in the same way

In her latest book, Leslie Kern, a professor at Mount Allison University, invites readers to take a second look around themselves and ask questions about the city they live in.

Even though Feminist City covers a lot of theory, it is interwoven with Kern’s personal experience in various cities and is easy to read. Starting as a wide-eyed child visiting London, continuing through her student years in Toronto, and going back to London throughout her pregnancy, Kern describes multiple layers of the urban experience.

She invites the reader to take a look out of their window and realise that essentially everything is designed and built by men: from city districts, housing and school placement to public toilets and snow removal policies. Architects and city planners look at the work of their predecessors and take inspiration from it. “White men cite other white men: it is what they have always done,” writes Kern.

Women are often left out of the equation. And especially pregnant ones and those who have children. Kern explains how public transport works around men’s journeys from their suburban homes in the morning to their offices in the city centre and back in the evening. They often don’t have to pick up their child from daycare, do the shopping, and run a thousand different errands on the way. Women, who are more likely to use public transport, find themselves unable to buy one ticket for all the stops or get into the metro with a pram.

Reminiscing about her teenage years when she used to sneak out of the house, Kern says thank you to her friends whose company allowed her to explore downtown Toronto. “Friendship made freedom in the city a possibility for us. In turn, the city streets intensified our bond,” she writes and asks why women should build their lives around romantic partnerships and not friendships.

But you can’t always rely on friends in the city — the environment needs to welcome you when you’re alone too. Kern explores the right and ability to be alone, which varies: a Black woman with a disability has a different experience than an able-bodied white woman.

Kern admits it took her time to develop knowledge of intersectionality. As an eager activist in Toronto, she took to the streets, unafraid of confrontation with the police, without realising that was not a possibility for everyone: “I’d been arrested before and wasn’t unwilling to let it happen again. One thing was different though. My ten-year-old daughter was at daycare and waiting for me to pick her up.”

In the final chapter, Kern analyses maybe the most serious issue facing women in cities — their safety. She quotes urban planning professor Carolyn Whitzman: “The crime women most fear is rape. The crime men most fear is robbery.” But instead of focusing on better lighting, cutting down bushes in parks, and installing CCTV, Kern simply says: “No amount of lighting is going to abolish the patriarchy.”

That’s the brilliance of the book. Kern takes the readers on a journey of urban exploration, pointing at all the mundane things women get frustrated by and linking them to the wider societal issues of inequality.

It is an enlightening read for all genders. Whether it connects personal experiences with their roots in the patriarchal system or just shows another perspective of urban life, readers will step out on the street knowing their city better.