Gender in the City

‘Gender in the city’ is a topic that has attracted attention mostly from feminist scholars working in a variety of disciplines such as geography, history, sociology, political science, planning, and architecture. Its development, from the 1960s, has followed two separate trajectories with work focusing either on women’s lives in Western cities or on women in cities in the Global South. The first half of this article gives an account of how these two fields emerged and what their major contributions have been and how these have changed over time. I then summarize work in the major current fields of interest to feminist urban scholars: the restructuring of urban form and of women’s lives; urban planning and design; urban public space and urban citizenship; housing/ homelessness/ homes; and women’s fear and pleasures in the city.