Anandita Ghosh and Shivani Satija on Gender and Development journal’s special issue on public space, which explores the many ways in which women and other marginalised groups inhabit and experience physical and digital spaces – reclaiming spaces and resisting even as they face erasure and exclusion.
Who can take to the streets in protest? Who feels safe, and who feels like they belong? How do different infrastructures make different communities feel? How are marginalised communities negotiating spaces for respite, leisure, fun, and solidarity? Where and what are these spaces?
Gender & Development journal’s Issue on “Gender and Public Space” addresses questions such as these while engaging with the expanding body of work on the subject. Guest-edited by Pumla Dineo Gqola, Iromi Perera, Shilpa Phadke, Nazanin Shahrokni, and Sofia Zaragocin, the issue centres the experiences of marginalised groups and examines physical and digital spaces and infrastructure through the lens of power, intersectional identities, solidarity, care, and citizenship.
Papers explore a wide range of spaces including parks, bridges, benches, public toilets, sugarcane fields, and digital platforms. Authors deploy a range of theoretical approaches and modes of analyses – including auto-ethnography, art, literary and film criticism, and archival work – and highlight the potential to reclaim public spaces, through movements, writing, artwork, and protest. The contributions span urban and rural spaces in countries including Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Chile, Egypt, Ethiopia, Greece, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iran, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Palestine, Peru, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, United Kingdom, and Uruguay.
Spaces of both liberation and exclusion
In this issue, streets emerged as a significant space of discussion. They are simultaneously spaces for liberation, income generation, political participation and connection with others, while also being spaces of harassment, intimidation, and exclusion.
Bednarczy explores this contradictory character of streets as sites of both gendered fear and political mobilisation in Argentina. Dessie describes how sex workers rely on the streets of Addis Ababa for their income but are often vulnerable to violence from the police. Aftab and her co-authors lay bare the shame, discrimination, and humiliation experienced by ‘lower’ caste, Christian women sanitary workers working in public spaces in Lahore. Additionally, control and regulation by the state impacts access to public space. In Peru, Perez-Brumer et al. point to COVID-19 policies that restricted mobility based on sex, and the consequent increase in fear of violence among trans people.
‘Authors reveal how maps are not just markers of physical spaces, but rather deeply political in the way that they can write some bodies and experiences out, or ensure others’ inclusion and recognition.’
Nonetheless, authors note how communities negotiate obstacles and restrictions. For instance, in the context of Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Pakistan, Jansen and co-authors elaborate on the tactics that queer communities used to negotiate risk and violence. Caparrós presents coping strategies that women cab drivers use while working in public spaces in Spain, such as avoiding night shifts. Dessie’s participants also deployed a range of strategies, such as only taking clients to hotels where the staff knew them. Authors also provide alternative framings of safety — Muchiri (2024) envisions safety as a process instead of a destination while examining young women’s civic participation in Nairobi, Rift Valley, and Nyanza in Kenya.
Public or private – liminal spaces and experiences
Even as streets emerge as spaces of contestations and negotiations, contributions challenge the very notion “public” and “private”. The authors of this collection challenge a range dichotomies such as care and paid work, sex and gender, male and female, and digital and physical by employing feminist, queer, and trans geographies: among these is the binary understanding of public and private.
In India, Jagannathan draws attention to thinnas – a verandah/porch that is attached to the front of homes serving as a quasi-public space that enables women homeworkers to participate in public to some extent. Similarly, Taneja draws attention ‘enclosed-outsides’ such as courtyards and terraces which serve as spaces for leisure and sociality. Subramaniam shows how women sugarcane field workers make use of ‘breathing spaces’ in shared kitchens outside their temporary homes, on the way to morning ablutions, and during transit between work sites, forming friendships and intergenerational alliances.
The blurring of dichotomies is also found in how people experience inclusion and exclusion, simultaneously. Lemma and Spark discuss how Ethiopian migrant women in Australia, construct a feeling of belonging and home in the streets of Footscray while simultaneously experiencing feelings of not belonging and lack of safety due to street harassment. Similar sentiments are echoed by Özdemir Dal and Görentaş in their article that deals with the experiences of Syrian women refugees in Turkey.
Digital and conceptual spaces
Contributions in this issue also look at digital and conceptual spaces. Sigurdardottir et al. show how TikTok users in Iran exercise agency through participation in the ‘Women-Life-Freedom’ movement, politicising the social media platform and bringing attention to their cause. Mehta’s study explores how a digital regional public space might emerge in the Middle East and North Africa, questioning generalisations about the region and emphasising the various, contradictory, and diverse representations of the “Arab World.” Moqadam highlights how Iranian women’s rich, agentic lives were dismissed and flattened in western accounts by comparing local historical accounts of women in Iran during the Naseri era (1848-1896).
The problems and possibilities of mapping
Further, authors look at mapping processes through walking, archiving, excavating, and writing. They reveal how maps are not just markers of physical spaces, but rather deeply political in the way that they can write some bodies and experiences out, or ensure others’ inclusion and recognition.
Through their respective works on Johannesburg and Kabul, Vosloo and Paul try to make sense of places and bodies that have been bounded, robbed, dispossessed, extracted, bombed, pillaged, and plundered —resulting in the loss of lives and identities as well as the destruction of families and homes. A key theme is the sense of “placelessness” linked to Blackness, gender, and movement/mobility. The authors connect with decolonial feminist thinkers and artists to reclaim and remap spaces to expose hidden histories. The sense of placelessness in trans people’s geographies is also addressed by Lubinsky and Aultman.
Some articles examine mental maps to illustrate the gendered nature of public spaces. Mental maps of safety help individuals navigate spaces perceived as dangerous or unsafe (Lemma and Spark; Abbas). Moreover, some authors examine mental maps through engagement with the perspectives and affective experiences of women and young girls (Katsavounidou; Theocharides-Feldman and King).
“Feeling designed out”: urban planning and gendered design
The issue also looks at urban planning and design. Theocharides-Feldman and King draw attention to how urban planning and design can lead to many feeling ‘designed out’ of public spaces and services. Surveillance of young women and girls in the UK and Greece, respectively, leave them feeling like they do not belong and out of place. In the context of infrastructures designed to be hostile towards queer bodies, Lubinsky and Aultman explore negotiating ‘forbidden’ desire and intimacy in public spaces. The powerful role of local and regional feminist activism and communing emerged in Levy and Celiberti’s work on the functioning of the Plaza las Pioneras in Montevideo, Uruguay – envisaging space as being in the process of commoning.
Cultivating solidarity, care, fun, and friendships
Authors in this issue also highlight the role of fun, friendships, and solidarities that emerge in the context of people gathering for shared activities and political actions – linking fun and resistance. Avila and Zamora demonstrate how alternative communities were formed in Mexico through care, friendship, and solidarity cultivated through cycling. Flesler and Spataro draw attention to the needs of the university community at the University of Buenos Aires, who talk of the need for spaces for “eating, resting, smoking, talking with classmates or colleagues, and even crying”.
Challenging erasures through art
For women, the public-space-body is primarily characterised by erasure. Many contributions in this issue speak to this erasure and the resistance to it. Avila and Zamora, Mattar, and Lubinsky and Aultman use creative writing styles and ‘aesthetic activism’, and highlight the experiences of trans, queer, and black persons, magnifying their grief and desire through art. The rhetorics by which Marasela creates an embodied language to synthesise conflicting presences, desires, fantasies, and unmourned erasures are traced in Vosloo’s article. Paul uses the postures of walking women to reflect on, revisit, and rewrite Afghan histories of access from 2000 to 2014. These articles evoke creative places where feelings are present, where desire, possibility, and hope coexist, and where normative, racist, and colonial conceptions of queerness, transness, and liminality are questioned and challenged.
Reflections
The authors in this special issue contribute to emerging areas of scholarship such friendships, feminist fun, and faltupan (idleness) among women in both urban and rural settings. Some add further value to public activism by integrating care, ecological sustainability and solidarity; others engage with affective and emotional dimensions of public spaces; and yet others use creative theorisation to contest frames of despair, drudgery, and death. We hope that these contributions will foster new interdisciplinary partnerships across philosophy, ecology, fiction, literature, feminist and transgender geography, and other fields, allowing for the emergence of innovative theories.
A few important themes are missing in this special issue, such as caste, disability, and religion as factors that shape engagement with public spaces. The issue also highlights gaps in scholarship such as the experiences and voices of children and young people.
This volume would be of interest to both scholars and practitioners, working on issues related to public spaces, and to readers who might want to explore the many ways in which public spaces are conceptualised and experienced. We hope the issue highlights the need to integrate community care and ecological sustainability into planning and design of public spaces; build solidarity and alliances at local and trans-regional levels; and reveal the need for more inclusive and equitable meanings to be attached to public spaces.
Author
Author
This piece is adapted from a blog on the Gender and Development Journal website with both blogs based on the introduction to the special issue authored by Pumla Dineo Gqola, Iromi Perera, Shilpa Phadke, Nazanin Shahrokni, Sofia Zaragocin, Shivani Satija, & Anandita Ghosh. You can access full text of the articles by searching for the title at Oxfam’s Policy and Practice knowledge hub.
References
Gqola, Pumla Dineo, Iromi Perera, Shilpa Phadke, Nazanin Shahrokni, Sofia Zaragocin, Shivani Satija, and Anandita Ghosh. 2024. “Gender and Public Space.” Gender & Development 32 (1–2): 1–25. doi:10.1080/13552074.2024.2376976.
Phadke, Shilpa (2010) ‘If women could risk pleasure: Reinterpreting violence in public space’, in Bishakha Datta (ed.) Nine Degrees of Justice: New Perspectives on Violence Against Women in India, Delhi: Zubaan.
Gqola, Pumla Dineo (2023) Female Fear Factory, Abuja & London: Cassava Republic Press.
Ranade, Shilpa and Shilpa Phadke (2023) ‘Putting people in place: Deconstructing gendered imaginations through mental maps’, in Hesam Kamalipour, Patricia Aelbrecht, and Nastaran Peimani (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Urban Design Research Methods (1st ed.). Routledge, pp 168–178.