Contentious Cities: Design and the Gendered Production of Space

Contentious Cities provides an interdisciplinary approach to understanding gendered spatial equity in the urban environment, focusing on design as a central component. It examines issues such as street harassment, heterosexuality, equity in access and mobility, segregation, isolation, and discrimination, and offers new insights into the representation of cities, the lived experience of cities, and how design can shift toward safer and more inclusive cities.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 266 pages
Publication date: 30 May 2022
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Contentious Cities is a groundbreaking book that offers unique interdisciplinary approaches to understanding gendered spatial equity in the urban environment. By positioning design as a central component in how cities produce, construct, represent, and materialize gendered spatial practices, it brings together practice and theory to critique, question, and enable solutions that challenge the root causes of gender inequalities in cities. Through a rich array of case studies, practice-led interventions, and historical and theoretical perspectives, the book examines important issues that affect the ways in which women, and people of diverse gender and sexual identities experience and participate in cities. The book is thematically organized, considering problems of street harassment, heterosexualization, equity in access and mobility, modes of segregation, isolation, and discrimination, as well as processes of resistance, intervention, and agency.

Grounded in feminist and queer methods of analysis, the book offers new insights regarding the representation of cities, the lived experience of cities, and how design-tactics and approaches might affect the ways cities shape and regulate how women and people of diverse gender and sexual identity inhabit, occupy, and move through the city. An examination of the ways in which design might shift toward safer and more inclusive cities, Contentious Cities will appeal to scholars of sociology, gender studies, urban studies, as well as those working in the fields of urban planning and design.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367520212