Feminist Cities

Examining the city through feminist and gendered lenses exposes the exclusions, hierarchies and injustices that underpin urban life, while also revealing the diverse ways in which urban space is being reimagined and reworked. The Feminist Cities priority area situates these issues within a global comparative framework, tracing the interconnections between cities across the Global North and South. 

Our work foregrounds the political, economic, social and cultural logics through which cities are made and remade, employing an intersectional and decolonial approach attentive to the entanglements of gender, race, class, sexuality and ecology. We seek to reimagine the conceptual frameworks of urban studies from the ground up – drawing on the everyday navigations, practices and imaginaries through which people inhabit and contest the city. 

We prioritise collaborative and co-constructed forms of knowledge production, developing innovative methodologies to analyse the material and symbolic dimensions of urban exclusion and to envision alternative urban futures capable of addressing the intertwined challenges of inequality, coloniality and climate change.

Academic lead

Kate Maclean is the academic lead for the Feminist Cities priority area. She is Professor of Feminist Geography, Managing Editor of Gender, Place & Culture, and a former Chair of the Gender and Feminist Geographies Research Group. Her research examines the intersections of the urban with gender, finance, livelihoods and violence, and includes numerous publications such as Cash, Clothes and Construction, Social Urbanism and the Politics of Violence, and most recently the article Crypto Dad and the Primal Horde: The gendered psychodynamics of regulating cryptocurrencies.