As International Women’s Day on Friday 8 March highlights the need for a fairer world and society, episode three of the University of Liverpool’s Original Ideas podcast series focuses on Feminist Cities.
Host Gavin Freeborn speaks with Professor Catherine Durose, Dr Catherine Queen, Dr Shreyashi Dasgupta and Dr Emma Spruce, about their research work and the Liverpool Feminist City Network.
In the podcast Professor Catherine Durose talks about how she was inspired to set up the Liverpool Feminist City Network, after reading a book by Canadian academic Leslie Kern who wrote the book Feminist City: Claiming Space in the Man-Made World (Verso, 2020).
Other colleagues soon joined the ranks, including Catherine Queen, Emma, and Shreyashi to combine forces and research interests across many subject areas across the University.
A ‘Feminist City’ is one which is human-centred and inclusive of marginalised groups, including but not limited to women. A number of cities internationally have now aligned with this label, including Glasgow which became the UK’s first self-proclaimed ‘Feminist City’ in 2022.
Dr Catherine Queen, from our Department of Geography and Planning commented:
“Some people may be quite anti-the idea and I think it’s because they’re not seeing it as a feminist research approach, however as soon as you start having that conversation…how does your life work? What do you have to do in the morning? Do you have to go to nursery? Do you have an elderly parent to look after? Do you have to get to work? All these practical issues combined can make the start of the day quite problematic. When you start talking to people in those terms, it becomes clearer what it is we’re looking at.”
The ‘Cities Alive: Designing Cities that Work for Women’ report, co-created by Dr Catherine Queen and colleagues in Geography and Planning, was published by ARUP and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). It shows that while women make up half the global urban population, cities have not been designed with them in mind. It calls on decision-makers, urban designers, and city planners to work towards cities that are more inclusive, safer, and equitable for women around the world. It was recently shortlisted for International Collaboration of the Year at the 2023 Time Higher Education Awards.
Early career researchers Dr Emma Spruce and Dr Shreyashi Dasgupta, talk about their intersectional academic research, which led them to join the Liverpool Feminist City Network. Emma is a Lecturer in Gender, Sexuality and Identity in the Department of Politics, in the School of Histories, Languages and Cultures and Shreyashi is a Lecturer in Critical Social & Political Geography in the School of Environmental Sciences. They talk about their experiences and research in the Global North and South, as well as life as an early career researcher at the University of Liverpool.
Dr Emma Spruce said:
“A lot of the time I think we think we know what makes people feel safe, but actually that’s not perfectly proven. It’s not data driven, or it has complicated effects on people. Things lik increasing lighting isn’t a straightforward win for everybody. Research policy is that slower and more critical lens, rather than just doing the same old things repeatedly, even though they didn’t work the first time.”
Explore the Liverpool Feminist City Network further and sign up to join the conversation.
Tune into the podcast here via app or desktop (bit.ly/Orig-Ideas) and check out the first and second episodes on air pollution and artificial intelligence featuring more of our brilliant academics, early career researchers and PhD candidates.
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