Cut, Paste, Empower

Feminist Agents of Urban Disobedience

Urban patriarchy surrounds us everywhere: it is written in stone, inscribed in ground plans and shapes the way we build. In terms of urban development, it holds on to the barely existing ideal of the capitalist nuclear family and the dichotomy of private and public based on it. Western urban planning designs with an ‘unmovable’ understanding of the dichotomy of private and public. The public is the site at which equality is lived in community, except for those who do not ‘fit’ the social norms of gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and age. The private is accordingly the necessary hidden space to ‘recover’. In the words of Hannah Arendt, the public is the realm of the political. Which means that men act in public, and the private is the space of the home, the intimate, the self, and the body associated with the female body. This segregation, which has not been overcome, influences planning decisions. The public space is not equally accessible to all; women in particular often feel that they do not belong. The work from woman is typically more related to the home, there are fewer opportunities for them in the public space. This gendered dichotomy needs to be broken in order to create equal use. With our Zine we want to show how we can occupy space differently, to no longer to dream of utopias for the city of tomorrow.