Feminist Research on Gender in the Urban Global South
Research Foci | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s+ |
Women and urbanization processes, especially rural to urban migration. | X | X | X | X |
Women and work: formal and informal sectors; women as active in production and reproduction (in the 1970s with a focus on basic needs policy and in the 1980s with a focus on the implications of the New International Division of Labour); feminist critiques of women’s work in prostitution. | X | X | X | X |
Land, housing and human settlements | X | X | X | |
Urban poverty; women’s triple role in production, reproduction and community management | ||||
Household structures; household survival strategies; distribution of resources within the household | X | X | X | |
Urban politics, especially squatter movements; urban service provision such as water, childcare, and transportation | X | X | X | |
Domestic spaces; the home | X | X | X | |
Urban crisis survival strategies; impact of structural adjustment programmes; urban citizenship | X | X | ||
Urban violence, domestic and economic | X | X | ||
Specific groups of workers, especially transnational migrant workers and sex workers; | X | X | ||
Urban environments: degradation of urban environments; women farmers in urban areas; urban feminist ecology | X | X | ||
Urban planning and women | X | X | ||
Gendered nature of urban space | X | X | ||
Urban health; women’s reproductive health; AIDS/ HIV | X | X | ||
Urban children and youth | X | X | ||
MDGs and women in urban places | X | |||
Sexualities and queered urban spaces | X | |||
Women in transnational urban families | X | |||
Women, fear and surveillance in urban places | X | |||
Women and the SDGs (esp. SDG5 and SDG11) | X |
Feminist Research on Gender in the Urban Global North
Research Foci | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s+ |
Gender and urbanization; urban form: city centre versus suburbs; processes of production (paid work) versus reproduction (unpaid work); urban restructuring | X | X | X | X |
Labour markets and work-home links, including childcare; transportation and access to facilities; (as well as from the late 1990s studies of parenting, childhood and children, care giving and the ethics of care) | X | X | X | X |
Urban planning, design and architecture | X | X | X | X |
Women and urban politics; urban social movements; women’s political participation (with the introduction in the late 1990s of urban citizenship) | X | X | X | X |
Domestic spaces; the home | X | X | X | |
Urban based identities of gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality; urban geographies of patriarchies; social constructions of difference, especially in relation to femininities and masculinities (with the introduction in the late 1990s of issues of racism, whiteness, and transnationalism | X | X | X | |
Women’s fear and urban places (with the introduction in the 2000s of issues of surveillance) | X | X | X | |
Urban poverty | X | X | X | |
Housing: homelessness and gentrification | X | X | X | |
Immigrant women, First Nations, Aboriginal women in cities; a focus on specific groups of workers such as domestic workers and sex workers | X | X | ||
Lesbian and gay urban geographies; LGBTTQ spaces; queer geographies, and later, transgendered geographies | X | X | ||
Embodied urban geographies | X | X | ||
Urban public space (though earlier studies on, for example, women’s access to parks and women only buildings date back to the late 1970s) | X | X | ||
Women’s spaces of pleasure /leisure, the female flaneur | X | X | ||
Urban emotional geographies | X | |||
Women and the SDGs (esp. SDG5 and SDG11) | X |
Reference:
Boserup, E. 1970. Women’s Role in Economic Development. Earthscan Publications.
Peake, L. and Pratt, G. 2017. Women in Cities. In. A. Bain and L. Peake eds. Globalization in a Global Context. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press.