Frontline ·
A city of her own
A feminist vision of architecture and urban planning would replace domination and hierarchy with participation and care as its guiding principles to create a space that can be considered truly democratic.
On August 22, while speaking with a young woman at a political meeting for women students in Pune, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, commented that “roads are controlled by patriarchy… businesses are controlled by patriarchy, the school education system is controlled by patriarchy...” I would add cities to the list.
The statement was striking not simply because Rahul Gandhi resoundingly acknowledged patriarchy as a political problem for Indian women but also because he connected deeply intertwined problems that otherwise appear separate and unrelated. A man harassing a girl on her way to school; the constant and exhausting male gaze; a woman being touched inappropriately in a crowded bus, even the overcrowded bus; the lack of affordable, safe, and accessible transit options; expensive car-centric infrastructure projects; poor last-mile connectivity; poor street lighting; the lack of resting spaces and childcare facilities; the absence of public toilets and the shortage of amenities, especially for women workers, street vendors, and the urban poor; moral policing; the felling of trees; cruelty toward animals; and the deepening climate crisis. All these may seem like disconnected, simultaneous crises of urban life, but they have their roots, in differing degrees, in a common and structural problem: a patriarchal spatial order, deeply mediated by caste, class, and religion, among other social factors.
In the context of cities, this order operates first at the epistemic level, in the very assumptions from which plans are drawn. Secondly at the level of representation: who is making these plans and taking these decisions. Traditional urban planning models take the default user to be male, human, able-bodied, often young, mobile, and engaged in paid, productive work. These latent assumptions nonetheless neglect many urban groups: women and children, particularly girls, the urban poor, the working class, persons with disabilities, religious and gender minorities, and other marginalised segments in the city. Cities are also often seen as exclusively human settlements, to the exclusion of every other being, whether animals, plants, or others that share the urban space.
One look at our car-centric cities reveals that the mobility needs of the privileged elite take precedence over everyone else’s. Compounding this, there is little to no meaningful public participation in the governance of cities. So, the assumptions are rarely tested against the people whose lives are impacted directly by these decisions. A feminist approach to cities is one in which the experiences of women and girls are placed at the heart of city architecture, design, and governance, through representation and participative planning.
Violence is a crude manifestation of the patriarchal control widely prevalent in cities. As I write this article, two young Muslim women journalists were allegedly detained and assaulted by the Delhi Police. Earlier, two adult men allegedly raped a minor, teenaged girl inside a moving private sleeper bus in Delhi. The last incident chillingly recalls the 2012 case of the gang rape and murder of a physiotherapy intern in Delhi. It provoked widespread protests, leading to significant changes in criminal law and the institution of the Nirbhaya Fund to support initiatives enhancing the security of women. None served as effective deterrents. Urban small talk among women in recent years includes not only discussions on the weather but also on how unsafe they feel. They swap personal strategies and tips for feeling safer.
In contrast, during the recent Cockroach Janata Party–led students’ protests at Jantar Mantar, many women posted about how safe they felt at the protest site, even among large, mixed crowds, with some of them spending the night out in the city or sleeping under the stars for the very first time. Shortly after that, Delhi Police personnel attacked the protesters, and we saw footage of policemen chasing young women and beating them up. This was followed by trolling, doxxing, and online sexual harassment disproportionately targeting female protesters.
As the scholars Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan, and Shilpa Ranade keenly demonstrated in Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets, women’s presence in public in India has been conditional, considered acceptable only if it signals respectability and a demonstrable purpose. Very often, women’s legitimate concerns about safety have been weaponised to constrain their autonomy, restricting their right to move and take up space in the city. The fear of public spaces has been used to chastise women and discourage them from stepping out, even though the home is often the space of violence, too.
Moral policing or anxieties over love jihad have been violently deployed to curtail freedom and chastise young couples in public parks, making it extremely difficult for young people, across boundaries of religion and caste, to loiter, hang out, and live their own lives in cities as full and equal citizens. However, the participation of women and girls in the recent students’ protests signals a changing ethos of public presence, one that challenges paternalistic and conservative morality and seeks to claim space in playful, messy, uncouth, even verbally offensive ways.
Critiquing the patriarchal urban spatial order, feminist geographers and architects have long criticised dominant urban planning models in the West for constructing what Jane Darke calls “man-shaped cities”. Dolores Hayden demonstrated how capitalist production and patriarchal domesticity influenced urban planning, reinforcing ideas that a “woman’s place is at home” and so limiting their participation in the material, social, and economic life of a city. Carolyn Merchant traced the roots of the environmental crisis to the rise of modern science and industrial capitalism in the West, which reconceptualised “reality as a machine rather than a living organism”. It resulted in an epistemic shift that enabled male domination of both women and nature. Women were symbolically and materially linked with the natural world, and this allowed the intensification of resource exploitation.
Consider this: if a state failed to guarantee basic bodily safety and mobility to half of its population in any other sphere, it would be considered a catastrophic failure of governance. Yet in the modern Indian city, this failure rarely registers as one. The first step in adopting a feminist approach to the city is to acknowledge the enormity of the problem and the failure of institutional responses in tackling it. The second step is to move beyond seeing each failure—of policing, leadership, infrastructure, transport, municipal administration, urban planning, or environmental regulation—as separate and instead examine how they work in tandem to produce an exclusionary urban space.
It is to ask how the city itself is organised and what the governing logic of urban life and citizenship is: whose needs are prioritised and whose are not, whose mobility is privileged and whose are restricted, whose presence in public space is treated as legitimate and whose as transgressive, and who is displaced, who is made space for, and who is entirely left out. These questions are asked not merely to understand how cities work but to actually transform the processes and relationships that could remake cities into more accessible, egalitarian, and enriching spaces. However, these are not easy problems to tackle. Structural constraints are deeply embedded in the legal and constitutional structures of urban governance and planning. For example, the 74th Constitutional Amendment envisaged ward committees as grassroots platforms for citizens’ participation but effectively remains on paper for many cities.
Instead, urban development and administrative functions are undertaken by techno-managerial, parastatal agencies operating with a top-down framework. There is little meaningful citizen participation in cities, much less a framework that envisages and allows for a robust, consultative, people-led approach to planning and urban design.
In 1929, in her essay “A Room of One’s Own”, Virginia Woolf explored the relationship between space, material resources, and women’s writing, sharply highlighting the systematic and material exclusion of women from British intellectual life. Positing that in order to have a creative life, a woman needs a room of her own, preferably with a lock, and a disposable income of £500 a year (a substantial sum for the time), Woolf identifies the social and material conditions that enable a woman’s capacity to participate in creative life.
In the context of the city, feminist urbanism asks: what are the material, social, economic, and ideological conditions required for a woman to participate fully in urban life, to be able to work, rest, move, belong, and participate in the city as an equal citizen?
In 1905, almost two decades before Woolf, Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain addressed these very questions in her extraordinary short story, “Sultana’s Dream”. A Bengali woman falls asleep and wakes up in Ladyland, a botanical city with hundreds of women on the streets, where men take care of domestic work and mind the children. Begum Rokeya constructs a world where women are able to reclaim their duty to themselves and their self-development, prefiguring modern feminist urbanist visions. There is little crime in Ladyland, and no police or magistrates. Everyone there works for only two hours a day, getting plentiful time for skilful artistic pursuits and scientific research.
To ask who the city is meant for is to ultimately ask what kind of vision one has for one’s city. A feminist vision envisages a participative, democratic model of citizenship in which domination and hierarchy are not the guiding principles; instead, this approach invites us to imagine cities from the perspective of care, enabling the building of infrastructure aimed at collective concern. It is a model that seeks to transform the processes of democratic participation to build cities for all, not just for a privileged few.
Sneha Visakha is pursuing doctoral studies in sociocultural anthropology and has a background in legal and policy research.