Gendered citizenship and the right to the city

This chapter reviews the different perspectives on gendered citizenship and its implications for discussions about the right to the city in different regions of the world. I outline the resurgence of interest in citizenship in the past few decades and its engendering and growing interest in the city as a key site of citizenship acts and support of increasingly diverse populations, not just for those with unquestioned access to entitlements but also to those denied or with precarious statuses. Approaches to citizenship have undergone a number of changes, moving our understanding away from an exclusive focus on an institutional analysis of inclusion and exclusion to acts of performing citizenship and making claims at different scales and sites, including the urban, in which citizenship is less tied to the formal membership of the nation-state. Hence I turn to examine how urban citizenship has been enriched by the concept of the right to the city, which a number of feminist scholars have critiqued for its absence of gender considerations. Though Henri Lefebvre did not engage with gender relations in his discussion of the right to the city, the concept is useful in drawing together the ways in which individuals and groups make claims to access resources, appropriate spaces and struggle to participate in city life which, particularly in larger cities, incorporates diverse populations whose right to the city has often been precarious. Thirdly, I outline some of the issues addressed in the growing literature in diverse contexts on gendering the right to the city, namely: rights to where in the city, the public and the private and migrant women.

This is a draft chapter/article. The final version is available in Handbook of Gender and the City edited by Peake, L., Datta, A. and Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, G., published in 2024, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd
http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781786436139.00024

It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

Though not peer reviewed, it received comments from the editors who are experts in urban studies. Book has been sent to the publisher.