Amnwpgef rcb% K _rcpg_j U urbanisation Urbanisation refers to the process of becoming urban; it is generally viewed as a process which results in an increase in the proportion of the population living in large, dense, heterogeneous settlements. It is also associated with the development of urbanism as a way of life and with cities becoming the engines of growth of the economy Although urbanisation is a process that has its origins circa 3,000 BCE, it was with the Industrial Revolution that the pace of urbanisation accelerated, and at the beginning of the twentyfirst century approximately 50 per cent of the world’s population lives in urban areas. Feminist concerns focus on both the role played by social relations, especially those of gender, in the production and reproduction of urban form and the extent to which the social position of women has improved with urbanisation. Literatures on First and Third World women have tended to follow separate trajectories and rarely acknowledge each other; although accounts exist of women’s lives in Third World towns and cities (see Sheldon 1996), it is in Europe and North America that most analytical work on the role of gender in processes of urbanisation, suburbanisation and counterurbanisation has OCUL Scholars Portal occurred. Women’s place is in the city (Wekerle 1984); sex ratios in urban areas reveal that women outnumber men, but for centuries there have been various attempts to assign women to the private sphere of the home and even to prevent them from entering public spaces (see public/private). Women have thereby been marginalised from the public spheres of society and ‘kept in their place’. Hence, the prurient associations of ‘women of the street’ with deviation and impurity i.e., disorder. Women have made numerous attempts to create their own urban spaces, from nunneries and women’s housing co-operatives to lesbian bars. Probably the most significant in current times are the initiatives that have emerged around women’s safety, such as half way houses and refuges for battered women. Indeed the issue of male violence against women provides one of the strongest links between mainstream feminisms and feminist urban issues. But it is not only through engagement in urban politics that women have been transforming city spaces; women have also created imaginary urban places, such as the urban utopia, Herland (1915), of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Many (white) feminists have argued that urban form, in particular the mid-twentiethcentury divide between city centre and suburbs, has served to increase women’s subordination by facilitating the removal of job opportunities from women and relegating them to the private sphere of the home. More recently, postmodern feminists, such as Wilson (1991) and others, have emphasised the economic, social and sexual freedoms and opportunities that have arisen from urbanisation. The rise of shopping, for example, gave women a legitimate right to be in public spaces, as did libraries, museums and MASJ% Qaf mj_pq% Nmpr_j Amnwpgef rcb% K _rcpg_j Entries A-Z 677 galleries. Critiques of the double dichotomy of male/public and female/ private spaces have also developed from African American feminists who argue that women of colour have a long engagement with waged work. The destabilisation of these heterosexual male and female divides is also evident in the various ways — from the gentrification of neighbourhoods and lesbian and gay pride parades—that lesbians and gays assert their presence in the urban environment. See also: poststructuralism/postmodernism References and further reading Gilman, C.P. (1915) Herland, London: Women’s Press, 1979. Sheldon, K. (ed.) (1996) Courtyards, Markets, City Streets: Urban Women in Africa, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Wekerle, G. (1984) ‘A Woman’s Place is in the City’, Antipode 16 (3): 1–16. Wilson, E. (1991) The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder and Women, London: Virago. LINDA PEAKE urban planning, women and OCUL Scholars Portal Urban planning is preoccupied with the need to control the city and, inter alia, women. As much an ideology as a technical practice, with its origins in nineteenth-century scientific rationalism, planning has searched out logical solutions to the allocation of scarce resources in attempts to create ‘order out of chaos’. Many feminist planners consider the interrelationships between land use and transportation to be the most important city-wide factor in determining the degree of ease with which women can live their daily lives. The rigid imposition of zoning, the separation of land uses, and the development of urban sprawl have created arduous time/space activity patterns for women given their responsibilities for childcare and the home. Although regulatory mechanisms are less rigid in many Third World cities, the planning problems experienced by women are exacerbated by nonfunctioning social and physical infrastructures as well as an increasing inability of national and local governments to manage and regulate urban life (see Moser and Peake 1995). Since the early 1980s there have arisen vibrant, loosely-knit women and planning movements in both First and Third World countries, such as Women Plan Toronto in Canada. Combining professional and community-based women, these movements have given rise to a sustained feminist critique of urban planning issues such as housing, childcare, disability (see disability, women and), retailing, safety, sport and leisure, technology and transport. They have illustrated the positive role feminist planners can play in the reproduction of social relations through alternative visions of urban life and the creation of new urban spaces. But little policy change has been evident in the built environment; women-centred planning policies are few and far between. In the 1990s, in MASJ% Qaf mj_pq% Nmpr_j Amnwpgef rcb% K _rcpg_j Encyclopedia of feminist theories 678 many places, the professional (and invariably patriarchal) culture of planning, combined with a scarcity of resources and a feminist backlash further served to marginalise feminist perspectives in planning, as, ironically, did the fashionable tropes of environmental sustainability and human rights. However, there is hope. As Clara Greed asserts, ‘The imprint of gender relations on space is not a mechanistic process, and is more likely to be achieved through the spread of ideas, and visions than through enforcement of planning policy’ (1994:18). References and further reading Greed, C. (1994) Women and Planning: Creating Gendered Realities, London: Routledge. Hayden, D. (1981) The Grand Domestic Revolution. A History of Feminist Design for American Homes, Neighbourhoods and Cities, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Moser, C. (1993) Gender, Planning and Development, London: Routledge. Moser, C. and Peake, L. (1995) ‘Seeing the Invisible: Women, Gender and Urban Development’, in R.Stren and J.Kjellberg Bell (eds) Urban Research in the Developing World, vol. 4 Perspectives on the City, Toronto: Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto, pp.279–348. LINDA PEAKE OCUL Scholars Portal utopias, feminist Utopia holds a constant appeal for literary feminism and not just because of its intrinsically political nature. Feminism has always gained its transformatory impetus from a belief that the future and the ‘not-yet’ can become the here-and-now. Toril Moi, for example, identifies the work of Hélène Cixous with ‘an invigorating utopian evocation of the imaginative powers of women’ (Moi 1985:126), while Angelika Bammer, in her excellent book on 1970s feminism, notes that ‘to the extent that feminism was—and is—based on the principle of women’s liberation…it was—and is—not only revolutionary but radically utopian’ (Bammer 1991:2). Utopia has been an important strand of women’s writing for centuries. In European terms Bammer identifies Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) as the first such publication, although as far as the English literary tradition is concerned, its most famous early practitioner was Margaret Cavendish, who wrote The Blazing World in 1668. But it was undoubtedly in the last three decades of the twentieth century that the real explosion of interest in the feminist utopia took place. Three American novels of the 1970s stand at the forefront of contemporary interest in this development: Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground (1979), each of which has received substantial critical attention. Collectively these three novels explore, in fiction, many of the central MASJ% Qaf mj_pq% Nmpr_j View publication stats