“Let them sing!” The paradoxes of gender mainstreaming in urban policy and urban scholarship

ABSTRACT

The early twenty first century has been a defining period for urbanization at a global scale. There is an urgent imperative to bring a gender analysis into debates on urbanization in this period of rapid urban growth and change. This article examines the potential of intergovernmental and scholarly spaces for gendering approaches to urbanization. We do so by reflecting on our experience of attending the 9th World Urban Forum (WUF 9), held in Kuala Lumpur in February 2018, as well as a series of academic conference sessions held in Toronto, New Orleans, and Montreal in 2018 on the theme of social reproduction and the development of a feminist urban theory for our time. We ask, to what extent do the discursive and performative strategies used in these different institutional settings serve to substantively center gender in transformative visions of the urban?

KEYWORDS:

• Urban theory
• SDGS
• feminist geography
• conferences
• United Nations

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Partnership Grant, ‘Urbanization, gender and the global south: a transformative knowledge network’ (File number 895-2017-1011). We are grateful to Pablo Bose and the two anonymous reviewers of this article for their positive and constructive feedback. We would also like to thank Linda Peake for her comments on the paper and support throughout the publication process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The 6-year GenUrb project is funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), and brings together a network of over 40 feminist scholars and activists. The project critically engages with academic research and policy making processes related to gender and the urban in order to address gendered place-making in cities. It includes research with low-income women and policy shapers in eight cities: Cochabamba, Bolivia; Georgetown, Guyana; Ibadan, Nigeria; Ramallah, Palestine; Shanghai, China; Cairo, Egypt; Mumbai, India; and, Delhi, India.

2. As authors, we recognize that gender is a non-binary category. However, in the UN context gender mainstreaming is primarily concerned with issues facing girls and women and this piece speaks in reference to these policy discussions.

3. Parts of this section, in particular the second paragraph, draw on unpublished materials from the GenUrb Project.

4. See the forthcoming publication coming from these conferences entitled, A Feminist Urban Theory for our Time: Rethinking Social Reproduction and the Urban (Peake, Koleth, Tanyildiz, Reddy, and Patrick, 2021 (in press)).

5. Both authors attended WUF 9, while only the first author attended the academic sessions. Our analysis and motivation for writing this piece stems from our discussions at WUF9 and subsequent conversations with each other as well as our ongoing scholarly work on the role of conferences in policy, activism, and academic debates (cf Temenos, 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [895-2017-1011].