Download Free Gender In The European Town Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Gender In The European Town and write the review.

Towns are imagined, lived and experienced, as much as they are conceived and constructed. They reflect cultural and intellectual currents, prevailing economic climates and unresolved tensions. They are physical entities, shaped by topography, time and technology, as well as social and spatial constructs. They are also always gendered and contested spaces. This volume, the last from the Gender in the European Town (GENETON) project, approaches life in the European town over time and across class and national boundaries. Through contextualized case studies, it provides scholars and students with new research--snapshots--of contemporary physical and built environments that explores how contemporary urban residents experienced and deployed gendered urban spaces over an important period of modernization.
Moving from the mid-seventeenth century to the near present, this book marks physical and conceptual changes across European towns and examines how gender was implicated and imbricated in those changes. As places which fostered and disseminated key social, economic, political and cultural developments, towns were central to the creation of gendered identities and the transmission of ideas across local, national and transnational boundaries. From 1650 to 2000, towns grew rapidly and responded to the needs for new infrastructures, physical reconfiguration and ideas of citizenship. Gender relations vary over space and time and are continually altering; such variation underlines the need for a thorough non- or even anti-essentialism. Drawing primarily on three themes of economy, civic identity and uses of space, the volume shows that urban development, and responses to it, is not gender neutral and thus argues for the fundamental importance of a gendered perspective. Gender in the European Town is a useful resource for all students and scholars interested in urban history and its interaction with gender from 1650 to the present.
This innovative new book is overtly and explicitly about female agency in eighteenth-century European towns. However, it positions female activity and decisions unequivocally in an urban world of institutions, laws, regulations, customs and ideologies. Gender politics complicated and shaped the day-to-day experiences of working women. Town rules and customs, as well as police and guilds’ regulations, affected women’s participation in the urban economy: most of the time, the formally recognized and legally accepted power of women – which is an essential component of female agency – was very limited. Yet these chapters draw attention to how women navigated these gendered terrains. As the book demonstrates, "exclusion" is too strong a word for the realities and pragmatism of women’s everyday lives. Frequently guild and corporate regulations were more about situating women and regulating their activities, rather than preventing them from operating in the urban economy. Similarly corporate structures, which were under stress, found flexible strategies to incorporate women who through their own initiative and activities put pressure on the systems. Women could benefit from the contradictions between moral and social unwritten norms and economic regulations, and could take advantage of the tolerance or complicity of urban authorities towards illicit practices. Women with a grasp of their rights and privileges could defend themselves and exploit legal systems with its loopholes and contradictions to achieve economic independence and power.
Bringing together a diverse team of leading scholars and professionals, this book offers a variety of insights into ongoing gender mainstreaming policies in Europe with a focus on urban/spatial planning. Gender mainstreaming was first legislated for in the European Union with the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1999 and, although many interesting developments have occurred throughout the decade that followed, there is still much to do in terms of policy, knowledge production, dissemination and education. This work contributes to all three objectives, by advancing the state of knowledge, as well as providing educational and professional tools in the field of gender sensitive planning in Europe. The volume begins by explaining the concept of gender mainstreaming in relation to its origins in the 'second wave' of the women's movement and critiques of planning, architecture, transport planning and other built environment disciplines. It then provides a brief history of how gender mainstreaming was incorporated into European law, before focussing on the theoretical issues and questions that surround the concept of gender mainstreaming as they relate to urban space and the planning of cities and regions, including a discussion of the persistence of inequalities between the sexes in their access to urban space and services. In particular, the division between waged and unwaged work and its impact on the social construction of gender and of the physical built environment is considered. The differences between definitions of feminism and their implications for action in planning and design are also explored, paying regard to the tensions between a feminist vision of a transformation of gender relations and the requirements of gender mainstreaming to accommodate the different needs of women and men in their everyday lives in urban space. Throughout the book, key issues recur, such as the importance of time and space in the experience of urbanism, resistances to change on the part of institutions and social structures, and the importance of networks. Education and training also appear as common themes, as do citizen participation and the structures of governance. The chapters are organised into four sections: concepts, structures, empowerment and spatial quality. Contributors demonstrate a variety of approaches to the intersections of gender, women, cities, and planning, dealing with substantive and procedural issues in planning, at both local and regional scales. They stress the links between environmental sustainability and gender-sensitive urban development. The book concludes by putting forward an outlook for future action.
This book conceives the role of the modern town as a crucial place for material and cultural circulations of luxury. It concentrates on a critical period of historical change, the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that was marked by the passage from a society of scarcity to one of expenditure and accumulation, from ranks and orders to greater social mobility, from traditional aristocratic luxury to a new bourgeois and even democratic form of luxury. This volume recognizes the notion that luxury operated as a mechanism of social separation, but also that all classes aspired to engage in consumption at some level, thus extending the idea of what constituted luxury and blurring the boundaries of class and status, often in unsettling ways. It moves beyond the moral aspects of luxury and the luxury debates to analyze how the production, distribution, purchase or display of luxury goods could participate in the creation of autonomous selves and thus challenge gender roles.
This book investigates the gender revolution in urban planning and public policy. Building on feminist urban studies, it introduces the concept of genderfication as a means of understanding the consequences of post-Fordist gender notions for the city. It traces the changes in western urban gender relations, arguing that in the post-Fordist urban landscape gender is used for urban planning and public policy – both to rebrand a city’s image and to produce space for gender-equal ideals, often at the cost of precarious urban populations. This is a topic that remains largely unexplored in critical urban studies and radical geography. Chapters cover how Jane Jacobs’ perspectives provide an alternative to the patriarchal modernist city for contemporary planners and using Rotterdam as a case study Van Den Berg discusses why new urban planning methods focus on attracting women and children as new urbanites. Topics include: forms of place marketing, gender as a repertoire for contemporary urban Imagineering and the concept of urban re-generation. The final chapter investigates how cities aiming to redefine themselves imagine future populations and how they design social policies that explicitly and particularly target women as mothers. Scholars in all fields of urban studies will find this work thought-provoking, instructive and informative.
Towns are imagined, lived and experienced, as much as they are conceived and constructed. They reflect cultural and intellectual currents, prevailing economic climates and unresolved tensions. They are physical entities, shaped by topography, time and technology, as well as social and spatial constructs. They are also always gendered and contested spaces. This volume, the last from the Gender in the European Town (GENETON) project, approaches life in the European town over time and across class and national boundaries. Through contextualized case studies, it provides scholars and students with new research—snapshots—of contemporary physical and built environments that explores how contemporary urban residents experienced and deployed gendered urban spaces over an important period of modernization.
Feminist City is an ongoing experiment in living differently, living better, and living more justly in an urban world. We live in the city of men. Our public spaces are not designed for female bodies. There is little consideration for women as mothers, workers or carers. The urban streets often are a place of threats rather than community. Gentrification has made the everyday lives of women even more difficult. What would a metropolis for working women look like? A city of friendships beyond Sex and the City. A transit system that accommodates mothers with strollers on the school run. A public space with enough toilets. A place where women can walk without harassment. In Feminist City, through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities built into our cities, homes, and neighborhoods. Kern offers an alternative vision of the feminist city. Taking on fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, and the joys and perils of being alone, Kern maps the city from new vantage points, laying out an intersectional feminist approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future. It is time to dismantle what we take for granted about cities and to ask how we can build more just, sustainable, and women-friendly cities together.
Artisans played a central role in the European town as it developed from the Middles Ages onwards. Their workshops were at the heart of productive activity, their guilds were often central to the political and legal order of towns, and their culture helped shape civic ritual and the urban order. These essays, which have all been specially written for this collection, explore the relationships between artisans and their towns across Europe between the beginning of the early-modern period and the end of the 19th century. They pay special attention to the processes of economic, juridicial and political change that have made the 18th and early 19th centuries a period of such significance. Written by leading historians of European artisans, the essays question the myths about artisans that have long pervaded research in the field. The leading myth was that shared by the artisans themselves - the myth of decline and the belief in each generation that artisans in the past had inhabited a better age. These essays open up for debate the nature of artisanship, the way economic change affected craft production, the political role of artisans, the cultural identification of the artisans with work and masculinity, and the way changing urban society and changing urban structure posed threats to which the artisans had to respond.
As Enlightenment notions of predictability, progress and the sense that humans could control and shape their environments informed European thought, catastrophes shook many towns to the core, challenging the new world view with dramatic impact. This book concentrates on a period marked by passage from a society of scarcity to one of expenditure and accumulation, from ranks and orders to greater social mobility, from traditional village life to new bourgeois and even individualistic urbanism. The volume employs a broad definition of catastrophe, as it examines how urban communities conceived, adapted to, and were transformed by catastrophes, both natural and human-made. Competing views of gender figure in the telling and retelling of these analyses: women as scapegoats, as vulnerable, as victims, even as cannibals or conversely as defenders, organizers of assistance, inspirers of men; and men in varied guises as protectors, governors and police, heroes, leaders, negotiators and honorable men. Gender is also deployed linguistically to feminize activities or even countries. Inevitably, however, these tragedies are mediated by myth and memory. They are not neutral events whose retelling is a simple narrative. Through a varied array of urban catastrophes, this book is a nuanced account that physically and metaphorically maps men and women into the urban landscape and the worlds of catastrophe.