Gender and the City: The Awful Being of Invisibility

In one of the short essays in his collection Le città invisibili, Italo Calvino tells of a dream had by generations of men. They dreamed of chasing a woman into a city, but they could not find her. So they enclosed the city so that she could not escape. The dream woman herself, however, was invisible. Moving beyond the fictive, recent work of feminist social scientists theorizes that every city is a gender regime that ideologically and concretely manifests a distinctive relationship among its political, economic, and familial systems. This gender regime is patriarchal: it reflects the social relations of power in any given society in which the values and behaviors of men are presumed normative and thus embedded in urban institutions and structures to privilege male control and insure female subordination.¹ This gender regime has also striven to keep women invisible—literally and figuratively, as much as possible—within the city.

Whether emanating from fiction or social science, these twin concepts of men constructing cities to control women and of women (and their bodies) being invisible in the city are the theme of this special issue: the city is a gendered space and place where women must struggle to destroy the barriers that have been erected to keep them invisible, to claim their bodies and their bodies' needs as integral parts of the city, and to assert their rightful visibility as urban citizens.

We need to clarify two points right from the start. First, this issue and its various essays reflect ideas about power, who wields it, and for what purposes. Thus, while all the essays discuss women's activities and attempts to render themselves visible, to turn the private into the public, the emphasis here is less on women's agency than on the social construction of gender as a powerful weapon used to impede that visibility. Second, as a gender analysis this issue focuses on understanding the city as place and space foremost in order to demonstrate that the city itself is a gendered patriarchal entity.² We acknowledge, [Begin Page xiii] of course, that not all men in the city are equal and that gender and the city could obviously focus on men as well as women. Yet we chose to focus the gender emphasis in this issue on the patriarchal nature of the city and how that affects urban place and space for women in order to enhance our understanding of the intersection of gender studies and women's studies.

As an urban historian and a gender historian, we wanted to offer a fresh perspective on gender and the city—a third way, so to speak—beyond the more usual tendency among scholars who write about the city, or among architects or urban planners who give concrete form to their ideas, to visualize the city in one of two ways. One way has been to visualize the city as a container, a place (a given structure) into which one can peer to see social, economic, political, cultural systems—the view from outside—or as a container to be reshaped and rebuilt according to some idea of what the "ideal city" should look like. An appropriate example of this tendency is a vision taken from Le Corbusier's idea of the "machine age" city: that the city should be organized to function as a machine, as a machine of interactive, disposable, powerful, and replaceable parts. Such a vision erases the human elements of the city.

The second tendency is that of socially oriented scholars, for example, those who focus on gender or class explanations, to view the city as a space comparable to any other space in which one can locate certain activities "on the ground," so to speak. This approach valorizes women (or social class) and makes women visible in the spaces of the city, but the city as place can remain almost invisible.

Our first challenge in refocusing attention on the city as a gendered space and place has been to make the city a visible place wherein there is both a historical and a...