Gendered Cities
On 14 September 2020, a 19-year-old girl was gang-raped in the Hathras district of Uttar Pradesh in India; two days later she succumbed to her injuries in a hospital in Delhi. The national and world media was appalled by the barbaric nature of the crime yet again for India has a history tainted with horrifying rape cases. People yet again condemned the system that never quite protects the women after repeated protests. Likewise, this is not the first time that people have taken to streets with nationwide protests.
India, on average has a woman raped every 15 minutes. Some cases are brought to attention, others are not. People will offer support and there will be a dramatized play of politics amongst national leaders which might lead to legal provisions being made, she might (hopefully) get justice but what is important to think about is ‑ it was also her city that failed her.
The 2016 UN report on the progress of women states: “Gender-neutral laws, policies, and programs unintentionally may perpetuate the consequences of past discrimination. They may be […] modelled on male lifestyles and […] fail to take into account aspects of women’s life experiences which may differ from those of men.” What we should not forget is that traditionally, cities are supposed to be standardised and gender-neutral, however bursting the bubble, we do happen to live in a dominantly patriarchal society that marginalises the other. This aspect of men dominating the policy and decision making of a city and the country leads to the experience of an urban city that differs with genders, where men stroll with an elaborate walk, all broad-shouldered whereas we see women half-folded into themselves in a defensive stance.
Indian Cities, in particular, have a knack for being labelled unsafe for women. I have often come across questions from my overseas friends ‑ ‘if India is safe for solo female travellers’ and I always end up discouraging them with a heavy heart. This image of an unsafe developing country, rich in culture (although crime rate might overtake the cultural notion soon) has turned out to be one of the international imageries of India apart from the Taj Mahal, Bollywood, and now, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, of course.
Gender relations embodied in the dominant heteronormativity, the sexual division of labour — paid and unpaid — motherhood, discourses on masculinity and femininity, child-rearing, gender violence, the feminisation of poverty and the likes, deeply affect the character of the city we live in and our right to it. Yet, the Right to the City has failed to include an intersectional approach to it.
Journalist and scholar Sunalini Kumar in her post about the pandemic writes how the lockdown and social distancing was, as she put it, ‘A time to walk solitary, unseen, un-touched, and un-followed in this otherwise belligerent city, just to buy milk, assured of a miraculous gap of 1.5 metres from the next customer’. What is funny yet worrying is that it took a pandemic for a woman to feel safe on the streets of the Indian (crime) capital of Delhi, providing her with a compromised version of the ‘Rights to her city’.
Henri Lefebvre who theorised the ‘Right to the City’ claims that “The right to the city cannot be considered as a simple right to visit or come back to the traditional cities. It can only be formulated as a right to urban life, transformed, renewed”. Thus, this concept relies on the pervasive and radical reformulation of urban structures and social relations.
While on one side of the world, India took to the streets to protest for the security of its women, the other side, the world celebrated the life of US’s Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a feminist and a warrior for gender parity. When Ginsburg was asked ‘When will there be enough (women on the Supreme Court)?’ and she replied with: “When there are nine”, emphasising that there can never be enough women in power. Perhaps, this should be the same for urban planning and policy making, so as to ensure that the Right to the City begins with the right to be taken into account — in all policy-making and processes of urban planning, to ensure participation, safety, and access, all of which women are denied in the male-dominated city.
For in an ideal world, it is the women who will plan the cities, ensuring equality and safety to the other genders! Well, one can hope…
