The Urban Myth

I loved this week's readings in The Sustainable Urban Development Reader. They touched on many ideas that I had not thought about before. Specifically, I loved Dolores Hayden's "Domesticating Urban Space." I felt she gave me a new perspective on urban spaces.

"When nineteenth-centry men (and women) argued that the good woman was at home in the kitchen with her husband, they implied that no decent woman was out in city streets, going places where men went. Thus, it was "unladylike" for a woman to earn her own living. Because the working woman was no one urban man's property (her father or her husband had failed to keep her at home), she was every urban man's property. She was the potential victim of harassment in the factory, in the office, on the street, in restaurants, and in places of amusement such as theaters or parks."

- Dolores Hayden, 1984

I loved this excerpt because she's talking about 19th century culture, in 1984, and it has lost no relevancy to modern society. Recently a video has gone viral of a women who secretly filmed herself walking around New York City for 10 hours to showcase all of the sexual harassment she faced.

This video has created quite the conversation around what qualifies as sexual harassment, but I think the message of this video is that a woman can't walk down the street alone without it being a spectacle. To me, it does not appear that this woman can claim any ownership over the city she lives in. It almost seems like she's a visitor in a man's city, and everyone feels the need to acknowledge that. "Because the working woman was no one urban man's property...she was every urban man's property."

This got me thinking about the effect urban spaces have on this preconceived notion - that a city is no place for a decent woman. It can't just be that the type of people who live in the city are the type of people to sexually harass women, can it? I grew up in suburbia and although sexual harassment existed, it was not as outspoken and public. But suburbs appear to be much more domesticated than the city - they are clean and spread out. Not many people walk because everyone has a car. They are sterile whereas cities are seen as dirty havens of crime and filth.

Is it the fact that in cities there are more people walking around town, and thus more dirty and crowded, that make people more irritable or more comfortable catcalling? And if this is the case, is it the opposite effect in suburbs: less people walking around and cleaner streets mean less personal interaction and therefore less catcalling? 

Or is it that a large city has less governance and accountability, so you can get away with more. Maybe its that there are larger homeless populations in cities, and social issues in general are greater, so people are just grumpy and needy. Maybe there's just more people in cities and therefore more bad people who catcall. Or maybe the institutional racism that forced minorities to live in cities while white flight occurred, while not allowing them to work in high-paying positions or get a decent education, and then decades later moving back into the neighborhoods they occupy and increasing the rent so that they can no longer afford to live there, has finally taken its toll and created a hostile environment in cities.

What do you guys think?

I don't know what is is, and I don't have the money to do the research, so let's assume its any number of reasons why. But what is the solution? It's not just women who don't feel comfortable, either. Families and children are left out of many urban planning, too.

Perlman & Sheehan (2007) have many excellent solutions to making our cities feel more safe. Ensuring decent work and a basic income for all people seems to be the first step. More people working means less people in the street with nothing to do all day, which has got to be a net positive. 

Developing innovative infrastructure would be a great way to break up the monotony of city streets - give people something new to look at and change their ideas about who owns it, perhaps. Promoting intelligent land use is right along side this. The plaza from the video clip we watched in class belonged to all citizens of the city - not just the male or privileged. 

Fostering transparent governance is vitally important to securing a city's safety. In order to have any successful solutions, a city needs an effective governance set in place.

Overall, it seems the solutions come from changing up the infrastructure of cities and getting people out of their element a bit, while creating spaces for everyone in the city to live in together.