Urban Contestation in a Feminist Register

Abstract

Approaches to urban contestation that challenge the dichotomy between institutionalization and opposition, and understand contestation as including engagement, are explored. The emphasis is on how recent forms of feminist analysis and critical scholarship open up a conceptual terrain for such thinking, and the discussion is grounded using further details of City for All Women Initiative/Initiative: une ville pour toutes les femmes (CAWI-IVTF), which is seen to be a concrete, successful case. Its tactics and strategies are noteworthy because of the manner in which ideas drawn from feminist and progressive organizing in other (including non-urban and non-Western) contexts have been incorporated. CAWI-IVTF's successes are most striking in relation to women who previously felt alienated from local politics. The organization's rationale, strategies, and tactics provide insights into how women active in this network create new spatialities, and how their interactions in space are producing new political subjects.

Key words:

• urban
• contestation
• feminist
• engagement
• subjectivities

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the women of CAWI-IVTF for supporting our research, as well as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (File # 410-2008-981) for the funds that made it possible. We thank three anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions on an earlier draft.

Notes

²On the challenges transportation constraints pose for working-poor women, see Rogalsky (2010)

³In 2006, the mayoral race was won with the slogan “Zero Means Zero,” referring to a promise not to raise taxes. In 2008, City Council approved a motion to increase taxes by 4.9%, a rate increase that ensured a significant budget shortfall.

⁴There have been numerous discussions about the pros and cons of setting up an official office, but until now CAWI-IVTF's physical location has been the homes of its staff (with appropriate compensation and provisions for separating home and work activities).

⁵Since 2004, active CAWI-IVTF members have included activists from the aboriginal, disabled, and francophone communities, university students and professors, and newcomers from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Iraq, Iran, Peru, Rwanda, Somalia, and Venezuela.