 Hi everyone, I'm so excited to be able to continue the exploration of what makes a more just built environment with today's feminist city. In this conversation we're going to ask what does a feminist future look like and how do we build communities of care. We've brought together Leslie Curran, an Associate Professor of Geography and Environment and the Director of Women's and Gender Studies at Mount Allison University, and our own Anna Pugianer, Associate Professor of Professional Practice to speak with the Jack Halpestam, Professor of Gender Studies in English and the Director of the Institute of Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality. Thank you to Jack and IRWGS for partnering with us. It's my great pleasure to welcome you. Welcome Jack. Okay, thank you so much. Hi everybody. Here we are in a virtual landscape of some kind. And we are going to discuss today. This is a fantastic new book, The Feminist City, and as Amale said, Leslie will be presenting alongside Anna Pugianer who writes, has written an amazing piece called The Kitchenless City about communities of women in Lima who create public kitchens. What we're, the way things are going to work. Leslie will do a presentation on her book. Anna will do a presentation on her research. I'll make a very brief response and then we will try to curate a lively Q&A. So we're going to start the order of things is that we're going to start with Anna Pugianer. And Anna, I think this would be a good time to start your video and maybe set up your shared screen. Thank you Jack for the intro and I will jump in really fast to start sharing my screen. In the meantime, let me thank the school for organizing this event, as well as Lila for the invitation. I'm really happy to be here today with Leslie and Jack to discuss about the future of feminist cities. And I will probably address contemporary collective kitchens during the Q&A and address, as Jack mentioned, the actual research that I'm doing about collective practices in different cities that are able to restructure a system of power. But finally today, I decided just to talk about the upcoming book, Kittles City, that does a more historical survey about the city of New York. And this is a book that will likely come out soon about a type of building with collective amenities as shared housekeeping services that emerged in New York at the verge of the 20th century. From 1871 until 1929, and they were called non-housekeeping apartments, family hotels, or most commonly called also apartment hotels. And were quite successful and quite profitable for developers and desired by small family structures, singles, especially working women, but also the elderly. And why do I think that this book is relevant? Because I think that the problematic division between productive and reproductive labor that emerged with capitalists still defines our way of living and generates a lot of social biases. So it's important to keep on talking about architectural proposals that try to reshape existing enclosures based on race, gender, age, and class that have been so characteristic of the capitalist society that we're living in. But let me just to frame a little bit more this distinction between productive and reproductive labor. Let me trace back some centuries and explain a little bit its historical background. So the transition from feudalist to capitalist was characterized by the so-called primitive accumulation as defined by Marx, which was based on the progressive concentration of land along with the operation of the formation of the independent worker, which happened and I'm talking about centuries from 14th century up until 18th century. Workers has for became independent from the land and became wage earners. And it's precisely with the emerge of the wage system that the idea of man as free productive force, this post of his own means of production, then was defined. And of course the consequences of this transformation shape societal relation in all scales from the body to the home, from the work to the territory, but also its management and divisions. And in fact, as Sylvia Federici recalls pretty well in her book, The Witch, the Caliban and the Witch, this protocol capitalist process required the transformation of the body into a work machine and resulted in the submission of women for the production, for the reproduction workforce. In that sense, primitive accumulation not only required accumulation of goods, but also the accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, and which hierarchy is built on, as mentioned, gender, race, and age, became constitutive of the formation of the modern proletariat. And I mean, this gigantic transformation, the idea of home and the city was gradually built in the image and likeness of these structural changes, progressively dividing and separating productive spaces, mostly occupied by men from residential places, from residential places of productive work, mostly occupied by women. An architectural played a huge role to define these divisions during the Enlightenment time, but also afterwards, especially during the period of industrialization. What happened with the first industrial revolution is that it meant a transition from to new manufacturing processes both in Europe and the United States. In the late 18th century, the invasion of the spinning Jenny and the development of motor driving machineries culminated in the settlement of new factories and the generation of new labor. It was then when women enter into industrial labor and needed, consequently, to combine both works productive and reproductive at the same time. Answering to this struggle and the growth of these industrial processes, several voices emerge. Well, and they're extremely well known and deeply influential as Robert Owen or chess Fourier, among others that claim the reformulation of labor and capital in social structures. The book wants to get to go deeper into which into this period which Dolores Haydn called the grand domestic revolution, in which a lot of architectural proposals tried to envision a new society in which reproductive labor was redefined. But while Dolores Haydn addressed her attention to the work of material feminist social utopists and the free lovers, among others. The book unveils those housing businesses that emerge in New York at that time, which operativity and principles were really similar to some of the material feminist ideas. And to my surprise, when I started researching, I could find hundreds of of them just in Manhattan, which allow me to understand the impact in New York City at the verge of their impact in New York City at the verge of the 20th century. On the image you have some examples of them. So we could speculate that these capitalist initiatives were kind of engulfing and appropriating some of socialist claims, as it happened, as it has just happened with the recent sharing economy, which despite initial principles have often only further patriarchal colonial and extra capitalist regimes. But I think that that assumption could be a bit too oversimplified. And because the situation was was a bit much more complex. Obviously, probably they were referenced or influenced by by the social utopists or indirect directly or indirectly. The growing culture around industrialization invited us to think about the value of the collective, not only as a force of production, but also as a way of living. But not only that, also, there was the influence of living in hotels. Real living was quite common at that time. In the first, it was quite popular in the first half of the 19th century. Actually, the first hotels emerged at the end of 18th century, just after right after the Constitution of the United States. And with the early republic and the new bourgeoisie society emerging, there was a need in the United States of a new typology and building able to represent the social change. So it was right after the new constitution that Washington that Washington had its first hotel in 1793. And it was one of the premier civic spaces to be a real blend of an image of democracy and commerce at the same time. And hotels really fast became places of technological experimentations being the first ones, for instance, to have running water or flashing toilets. Actually, by the way, the first indoor flashing toilets were not segregated as Susan and Stryker mentions in her writings. So the book is divided in four chapters. It starts from the very beginning from the emerge of this typology and the history of this apartment hotel states back right after the depression of that followed the American Civil War in 1860, 1865. That due to the lack of land and housing stock, actually most American cities needed to build apartments and lower the cost for middle income tenants. Working families with medium salaries as teachers, artists, vendors couldn't neither afford to buy a downhouse neither rented, but also needed a for or accept to build in tenement buildings that were actually the only collective housing available. That lack of facilities, bathrooms, kitchens and so, but also they were overpopulated and lack of healthiness. So these type of images were usually filled the media. So there was a need of a new type of multi-development housing to improve actually the tenement conditions. And appear at the time in 1870 different housing typologies and some of them remembering the auto living and influenced by the social utopists combined European apartment type with the American auto type. So in already in 1871, just one year after the first, the so-called first collective housing apartment in New York was built, always the idea of first is a bit tricky because there were many before that. But in, as I mentioned in 1871, it opened an apartment building with auto services, which apartments had kitchens, but there was a shared kitchen at the ground as many other shared amenities. And right after the hide house, the Stevens also opens and the Grossbrunner as well. And the Grossbrunner was the first one to open the collective kitchen to the public operating it as a restaurant. So suddenly these domestic institutions became in between the private and the public sphere. And this apology between the apartment and hotel was quite successful and desired for a wide range of population. And we know that because of the proof of the diversity of the dwellers, we know that look into the floor plan so we can find a small typologies of a small size apartment like this one with just two rooms and a bathroom to extremely large one as the actual apartment house, which contain two apartments per floor. And as you see in the image, many, many rooms and many different types of services, but no kitchen at all. We know as well that this phenomenon of auto services and apartment buildings were not, it didn't just happen in New York and it also happened in many other cities, just that in New York flourished a lot for many reasons as we will see. So during the early years, most of these typologies were built around 5th Avenue, but with the opening of the elevated railroad alongside 9th Avenue in 1879, as well as a consolidation of Central Park in the 70s, most were built in the Upper West Side area area. The first floor completed in 1889 when it was built was totally isolated. And from the last floor, one could enjoy spectacular views from Central Park and the surroundings. So suddenly the easy accessibility thanks to the elevator and the views that this type of high buildings offer converted the top floor and attractive place to be. And suddenly all those collective amenities and shared spaces started to occupy these outdoor spaces becoming public dining places and places of leisure and particularly and really important places of social engagement. And as you see, these buildings in the Upper West Side in contrast with the Hight House and the former buildings that we saw were much larger and started to have many more amenities. But also what is interesting about them is that they started to offer a lot of flexibility in terms of the compositions of the apartments. As we see in the San Remo, the hotel, for instance, offer different size apartments ranging from between two rooms with a bathroom until nine rooms with two bathrooms. And the choices happened because there was a room that connected the different apartments. So it allowed to enlarge or decrease the apartment size, depending on the demand. At this time already we're talking about a time that the technology has already 30 years old, so it started to be quite mature. And they knew for sure that this flexibility would assure better rentability. The Ansonia, for instance, that was built at the verge of the 20th century, apart from allowing the apartments to expand and decrease, also offer apartments with kitchens and apartments without kitchens. The diversity of apartments, as you see in this image, was extremely large. And they started, and that's a key also for their later decay, they started to rent single rooms in a temporal manner, similarly to hotels. So those rooms that allowed to expand and decrease, suddenly they started to be rented per night as well. And the services were extraordinary. I mean, the Ansonia had a dining room of 1,300 people and a gym and a parking, and even a farm on the roof that had 500 chickens and dogs, and they were offering fresh milk and eggs to the inhabitants. So they were like, you know, offering this kind of extraordinary amenities to the residents. What is interesting, and this is the key of the success in New York of this typology, is that as you see in this map that I started mapping where they were, there's actually a boom after 1901. And this peak that started in 1901 and ended in 1929, it happened because the enactment of the first housing law, the Tenman House Law, that it was defined in 1901 in order to regulate the conditions of residential buildings, but particularly the conditions of those tenements that I was showing before, which needed to be improved. And the law suddenly left kitchenless apartments outside of its scope to the point that an apartment hotel could be built higher and larger in the same lot than building with kitchen apartments. So this loser legal framework made apartment hotels clearly the advantages for developers in New York who then suddenly saw the typology as an amazing good investment, but not only that, consequently, suddenly also the collective domestic services were really affordable for a wider range of the population, because the prices could be reduced. So the book, I'm going to just go really fast through the other three chapters just to give you a glimpse of what it shows. The second chapter talks about, describes the several different projects that already the owners hide and talk about them, of the social utopies that define cities based on shared productive labor, collective productive labor. And I trace how these projects happen at the same time those commercial initiatives were also happening, and I establish certain relations among them. And I do relate how these utopist socialist projects are linked also with the emerge of certain technologies during the second part of the 19th century. The third chapter probably is my favorite one. I talk about a phenomenon that starts in this kitchenless apartments at the verge of the 20th century when they start to host little cooking devices. So at the beginning it was just the installation of small cooking devices for a light cooking once in a while to complement the collective kitchen. But these casual cooking devices that were installed and started to be largely published in magazines and newspaper, they were soon and really fast commodified and sold as furniture. This is a furniture that could occupy any cupboard available or any corner, any nook, and to turn that space into a small kitchen, into a compact kitchen. But all these compact kitchens happened way before 1926, the famous 1926 Frankfurt kitchen, and they were deeply influential to the definition of the typology during this first decade of the 20th century. There were, as I mentioned, commercialized as a space saving device. And we know that the compact kitchen was related always with a collective kitchen, looking to the detail of this commercial compact kitchens that as you see in the image. The ice compartment always had two doors, one connecting to the corridor, the other one connecting to the indoor space in order to allow this exchange of services. So in other words, the food that was coming from the collective kitchen could be placed directly in the ice compartment that had also a hot compartment above. And I explained how these kitchens through, especially in the second decade of the 20th century, started to be appropriated and engulfed by domestic engineers and how really fast started to be understood, not a space saving device, but rather as labor saving devices. And the fourth and last chapter explains what happens with the typology after the First World War in the war in 20s. It's a moment of, again, an explosion of the construction of this type influenced deeply influenced by the new Zoni law of 1916. That due to that fact, the new housing, the apartment hotels started to be combined with combined with other uses in order to fill these huge envelopes defined by the law. So apartment hostels started to be combined with hotels, sorry, with museums, with, with the schools, other uses, and how the famous shared rooftops started to disappear in favor of private services. And how obviously living in the air started to be something to sell. And how it started to be also a strategy for, for class classification, the higher the better. And I introduced how Central Station was so influential for a new generation on our apartment hotels that they started to understand the city at large. And thanks to the influence of this project in 1929 and 25 to the city emerge, it was the first part of the city that offer kitchen less apartments and kitchen apartments with share amenities that operate in a neighborhood level. So all these buildings relate one to each other and share the collective kitchens and the different domestic amenities. It was a real city within a city. The chapter ends up talking about the decay of the typology and why after 1929 the typology started to disappear. First, because a series of, of legal procedures that the hotel lobby started in 1926, and, and they were all, and they were called under the title book like hotels, basically the auto level is that auto lobby started to be a little bit jealous or thought that this apartment types were actually doing an unfair competition to their business. And they were put, they put a lot of pressure to change the housing law. So in 1929, as a consequence, the housing law was changed and suddenly this typology lost all its privilege along. And this is not only the, this is not the only reason why of the decay but there were many others as obviously that the crack of the economic crack that happened in 1929, but also the emerge of domestic engineer and the success of understanding that productive labor could be combined easily with reproductive labor. And I'm going to leave it here to continue doing the Q&A. Thank you. Thank you so much, Anna. There's so much to discuss there. Very, very excited to hear about this research. Okay, Leslie, we're going to turn over to you to hear about the feminist city and then we'll see if we can bring these two projects together. Thank you so much. Thank you to the different programs and departments at Columbia for inviting me and I'm really grateful to both Jack and Anna for being joining me on this panel and setting us up for what will hopefully be a great conversation. So as the introductions shared, I am the author of a recent book called Feminist City, Claiming Space in a Manmade World. And I will talk a little bit about the book, but I also want to kind of rush us fast forward to the very, very, very present moment and have a conversation about what some of the ideas about a Feminist City have to say or can speak to in the present moment. So I'm coming to you today from what is currently known as Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada and the unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq and Wolestekai people where we are governed by treaties of peace and friendship. My institution is Mount Allison University, which is kind of the Canadian version of a small liberal arts college. This book was written well before COVID and it's been fascinating to me to be talking about this work in a time when so many of these ideas suddenly people are like, Oh, yes, these things are a problem or this is something that we should be talking about. And for many of us, it's like, Well, yes, we should have been talking about these things all along. I just want to acknowledge right away that I am definitely not the first person to say either anything that is in the book, or the things that I'm going to share with you in our conversation today. So this book, just to give you a tiny little sense of what it's what it's about, it's meant for a wide audience of people and my vision was to sort of connect based on personal experience of living in the city with all of the tensions that that brings for those who are women. And to explore from both the perspective of, you know, what are the opportunities offered by the city and what are also the constraints. And again, I think in the present moment we're really those those things have been really sharpened for us in some quite, I think quite visceral ways. So the good news is that people seem to be open to hearing some of these feminists anti racist decolonial critiques of disciplines like planning urban design and architecture and, you know, I'm hoping that this is a moment where some of those themes in the book about the ways in which the spaces around us are not just stages where our social relations play out but that they are also active participants in these kinds of social relations and that they are not sort of God given right we can change the built environment and we can set it up to support the kinds of societies that we want to have. Alright, as I said, I just want to really launch us right into the present moment so I'm going to share a couple of headlines from recently so first one her kid had a stuffy nose now hers is one of many Ontario families in coven 19 testing limbo so this is a story about families where their kids are going back to school, they have a runny nose which is like 80% of children all the time right, but they have to come out of school be tested for coven, and there's a long backlog because of course. There's a massive uptick in this now that schools have gone back in. And the thing to note is that every story that I've seen about this. It's always the mother who has had to stay home from work while they're waiting for their child to be tested and to get the result of that test. Here's another one again from Canada from Toronto which is my home city overcrowded buses worry commuters as coven 19 cases rise and whether turns colder. She acknowledges physical distancing is not possible on some routes, and these roots that the Transit Commission is talking about are the roots, the primarily bus routes that run through what we call the inner suburbs in Toronto which are lower income racialized migrant neighborhoods where the kind of people who do the essential labor and the underpaid care labor of the city are commuting from so they are uniquely and disproportionately exposed to the risks of having to take overcrowded public transit with a system that seems to say there's nothing we can do about it. A couple of others parents who work in childcare are trapped in an unsustainable system so this piece points out that people who provide childcare paid childcare, don't make enough money to put their own children in childcare. So this becomes this catch 22 kind of situation, and you know no surprise to many people the pandemic has exacerbated the gender divide in household labor where we have a situation where in many families, heterosexual families, the male partners still not doing their full share of the work. So I wanted to share these and to give you a couple of Canadian headlines as well to really illustrate for maybe a primarily American but also international audience that even in a country where we say that the pandemic has been handled relatively well that these kinds of gendered and racialized care labor problems persist. And what this suggests to me is that there are a whole lot of assumptions still underlying the way that we set up our cities and our homes and a whole lot of being okay with relying on a very shaky, unequal and exploitative status quo that some people are only just realizing is kind of a problem. So COVID did not create these problems right, not, not at all these things go back a very, very long time. But the question we can ask is, you know, where do we find communities of care and what are our cities doing or not doing that could be making a difference here so I argue both in the book and in all of my kind of ranting about these topics over the last few months that communities have been long been content pretty much to assume that the provisioning of care will happen in the home and will be largely unpaid. So we might ask, you know, how active have cities been in creating or lobbying for affordable or free childcare. And just waiting for national governments to maybe possibly sort of do something about this which is a recent promise of our federal government here in Canada. How many cities have actively and positively responded to calls for living wages and higher minimum wages, which would impact primarily women people of color and those in all of these underpaid service and caregiving work jobs, some of which suddenly got called essential labor. So it's clear to many of us that we are in a care crisis, and in some ways it's nothing new, but the COVID situation has really amplified it in many ways so I'm just going to put a few points up here for us to think about right now. I would argue that one that care work has remained and I would argue quite deliberately hidden and invisible within the private family home. This is a status quo that works quite well for some people right so there's been, I would say relatively little interest in actually changing this status quo. The second point is that in many households men still do not do a full share of childcare and housework. The public care work so that is work that is paid and is done and what we call the public sphere has still been underpaid undervalued and even stigmatized, and therefore has fallen to the most marginalized groups in society, people of color, recent immigrants, and we've certainly seen that those are the groups who have been most disproportionately exposed to the harms of COVID in part because of the care work that they do so again, even here in, you know, this wonderful paradise of Canada, people who worked, especially in places like long term care homes who are primarily recent immigrants, low income people, women, even refugees have had higher rates of COVID infection and deaths than other people in the population. And I think we're also seeing that that some very problematic assumptions about who does care work really do run rampant in policy making in every sector because it seems to have come as a surprise to our governments, that it is that like you can't reopen the economy without childcare. And it's sort of like, Oh, right, yes, that's, that's going to be a problem. So to me what that illustrates is that we have been for a very long time kind of okay to rest on the assumption that care work, even if it's being done unequally and kind of intuitively it's okay it's being done in the home, without really realizing those other aspects of our social system that are that really allow the economy to run and when you take some of those pieces away whether it's pay childcare or schooling, then the whole house of the economy starts to come crumbling down. So then what does it mean to envision a feminist city or as I say here a potentially a more feminist city as a kind of aspirational, both concept and hopefully real place. And also, maybe think about some new assumptions and starting points and let me just say right here that when I was planning this talk I was thinking, Oh, geez, this is Columbia I, I better have some smart things to say right I better bring some theory to this conversation, better to show that I know what I'm talking about. But ultimately, I have just kept coming back to points that seem so wildly obvious, and yet seem to require rearticulation again and again and again so I apologize if this like doesn't seem smart, but I don't know to accept to keep talking about these things in the hope that we can drive some of these points home to the places that really need to hear them, and that would include people in urban planning design and architecture professions, policymakers, politicians and even just, you know, as everyday people as well. Okay, so the first one that I put up here is is the idea that what we think of as the minority is perhaps the majority or the idea that the niche is the whole so I think sometimes there's an assumption that if we plan like a city for women, or if we plan around elderly or disabled people or queer families or recent immigrants that we're planning for a minority and that we're focusing on a niche but what I want to suggest to that is that when you take all of those so called minorities together that they are actually the majority. And that this thing that we have been thinking of as the majority like a white middle class family says able bodied heterosexual like that might actually be the minority at this point. So we know for example that you know a really large percentage of the population has some form of a disability. We know that in most so called developed countries our population is aging. So let's stop thinking about designing for these different groups as kind of a niche project and actually think of it as that is the majority project that is the that is the center, not the margin right so bring the margin to the center. Thank you, bell hooks. My second point home is not what we think it is right and again this is very clearly illustrated at especially at the beginning of the pandemic with isolation and lockdown, where, again it seemed like for some people the realization that home is not a safe space for everybody that home is where everybody has a home right that home is not a place where many people can work and live and take care of children at the same time. So really showing I think a lot of very class and race biased assumptions about what home is, and the ways in which we know the kinds of homes that we want to provide as you know city planners and so on really needs like a profound shaking up around this idea that home is not what we have thought it was for for so long. Yeah, people have bodies right again something that seems to have been forgotten it may be in a lot of planning but that is coming to the fore in this moment and just from stories like, you know people going to public parks and having nowhere to go to the bathroom. So we're being told socialize outside go to public space do this sort of thing and yet there's no toilets, and suddenly people are saying oh yeah why don't we have any public toilets. And again people have been talking about this for a long time but nobody has paid attention. So when we're thinking about new ways of using public space of kind of turning some of the outside inside and vice versa, we have to keep in mind the very real messy embodied reality of a city for people, and not just people who are who are just moving in linear ways from one place to the next but that people who have needs for sitting and rest and shelter and shade and food and toilets and care. And again maybe instead of those being extras that we add on to the places that we design the buildings that we make maybe that is the center and not something that we add on at the end. My final point here. I'll just say it, you know we can argue about this I guess maybe some people would argue about this but I think care work is the economy or at least that there is no separation, really between care work and what we have come to call the economy, which has all sorts of assumptions behind it just that language that what counts as the economy is this so called public world of work it's our restaurants and bars apparently is the economy. And then we know that when we pull that or we shake up that piece of around care work when we pull that out when we don't support it properly both in terms of a redistribution of that labor and in terms of paying people to do that labor well and so on then we kind of things really can collapse at that point. So for me this is not just about a kind of redistribution within the home so yes I showed that slide about you know men not still doing their their full share of child care work and so on in the home but we can't rely on to sort of individualizing this problem and telling people to kind of like telling men to man up I guess and change more diapers because this to me is a broader question right we don't want to just bring this back to a set of solutions that are essentially based around the private family and again an assumption about what the family is and what the home is so we have to think about ways of redistributing care labor in in a much wider way in so that we are thinking about all sorts of different family forms so it doesn't make sense to talk about redistribution of care labor in the home for single parents, for example, we also want to think about queer families we want to think about families of essential workers, people who simply don't have the kind of freedom to like re juggle who's going to do the dishes and who's going to get the kids to school and so on. So we have to think about what are the public solutions to that and maybe what also are the sorts of spatial solutions to that. So how can we create spaces for care. Now this is where again I make a confession right I'm not a planner or an architect in fact I'm barely a geographer my degrees are in women's and gender studies so I come to this from a very particular and but outsiders set of angles so all I can offer are some provocations for people who may have more direct influence over these sorts of things but what are some first steps right what are the ways in which those who have the will and the power to do so can think about these problems in different ways so one would be first of all recognizing what already exists in terms of different sorts of care networks recognizing what is already there that is outside of what we call the economy right or what we call care work in the home and realizing that there's like a whole kind of in between world where people do all sorts of things for one another that are somewhat outside of even you know capitalism and that involve all kinds of other social networks so we don't have to reinvent everything from the ground up there's a lot of people already doing this sort of work. We also have to make it intersectional right and not just sort of replace one dominant group with another slightly less dominant group and think about how the city will work for them but the benefit of this to me though is that actually some of the spatial solutions that work for one group of people can actually be quite good for many groups of people so it's not that intersectionality makes us kind of locks us into a position where we are again only serving the needs of one very narrow group of people but actually when we kind of design from the needs of the most marginalized for example we end up serving a really wide variety of needs I think so an intersectional analysis should not be something that we maybe add on at the end if we have time but we can start there and see where that takes us supporting care networks not care boxes and what I mean by care boxes is like the home right or the single family home so we want to think about how can we set up our cities are transportation networks are spaces within cities. Our social services are linkages and so on such that care becomes networked and distributed and not focused within the very problematic single family home so leading to the next point let's just like blow up the home in the family right and I guess I don't totally mean that literally but what I mean is more blow up our ideas about what the home and the family is and it was so exciting to hear and speak but also kind of like frustrating because you think oh all of these ideas have been around for so long and we've lost sight of so many different ways of making homes or even the idea that homes could be flexible spaces so that to me is like both hopeful and frustrating but maybe mostly hopeful. And then finally I would say you know giving communities control so what works for one neighborhood might not work for another neighborhood and different groups of people need to feel ownership over the kinds of spaces networks. Buildings and so on that people might design for them. So as I said you know is there anything new here in many ways I don't think so and yet the COVID crisis seems to have led many people to simply be discovering things for the first time like that domestic violence is a problem that unpaid care work is not a sustainable way of setting up our economy that there is still a gender division of labor and that there is underpaid service work being done by racialized and otherwise marginalized people in our society and to me this is you know why we cannot aim to go back to normal because normal was really kind of messed up quite frankly so going back to normal is not really an option. The fact that some people seem to be hearing about or discovering or just thinking about some of these things for the first time in their lives says really to me it says a lot about how power works right power works to kind of hide all of the things that are existing to support your power and privilege. And when some of those curtains get peeled back and you can suddenly see all of the things that have been set up to make your life easier at the expense of others. Hopefully we don't just pull the curtains back over that so many people might be quote unquote discovering these things for the first time but my hope is that we can make sure that they don't forget them and have to rediscover them again in in the future. So those are my remarks. Thank you. I'll make my publicist happy by putting a link to the book in the in the chat. Thank you. All right, beautiful. Thank you, Leslie. Thank you, Anna. I'm in a weird internet spot so if I freeze or disappear or something just just be patient I will come back. So it's a real pleasure to listen to these presentations and to have a chance to respond to some of the ideas presented here. The relationship to architecture has come in the form of a kind of deep engagement with the ideas of Gordon Matt Clark and the an architecture group of the 1970s, and taking some of those concepts from that vocabulary of unbuilding and dismantling and trying to apply it to quit contemporary queer theory and different notions of a gendered body that instead of trying to build a body we might be interested now in unbuilding. So I would like to apply that to the concept of the gendered city. This idea that we shouldn't just be building a gendered city but we should also be unbuilding the patriarchal systems and foundations and subsystems that invisibly support a city through which white men move easily conduct commerce uninterrupted and enable the flow of global capital. That's part of the project that I would like to sort of introduce into the conversation here. And actually, the an architecture group, some of their projects connected nicely with what Anna's talking about in the sense that one of their projects was called food, and was about creating collective spaces for both conviviality that was organized around sharing food, but also the distribution of food. And so with Anna's project, I guess I wanted to hear a little bit more about the gendered arc of this narrative in which we move from sort of collective imaginaries of shared living spaces in which the space that is your own is just a space into which you might retire, but that many of the functions that we now think about as private were in fact shared collective spaces that encourage people to think about labor is shared to think about what was possible if many people within a certain area work together on something, you know, all of those ideas are available in these apartment hotels that you describe. So my question about that is how often was there a kind of feminist intention or a Marxist intention or even an anarchist intention behind these collective projects and how how does how do those ideas then get taken up in the communities that you're researching in Lima Peru, whether are these community kitchens that women are, you know, building and developing in order to not just share food but to share labor, to break labor out of its, you know, dependence upon the intense activities of a group of women right so that that's one question that I would love to hear you answer and then Leslie I guess that my first question is very obvious which is who is the woman of the feminist city you know I mean the category of woman is so contested today. That it doesn't seem like there would be an obvious subject there of the feminist city and I know in no way are you simply referring to woman as a subject of the feminist city. So how might we think about these new gender templates that both emerge alongside the reimagined built environment but also are productive of new relations within a built environment. So how can we, how can we rethink gender and architecture together as opposed to thinking about one as enabling the other in relationship to that. I'm thinking a lot about Samuel Delaney's book Times Square read Times Square blue I don't yeah I think probably you, you know this book, which, you know, was written over a decade ago, and was about the way in which the gentrification Times Square in the 1990s completely eradicated subterranean sex cultures of the kind that Delaney himself participated in, and through his, his, his meditation on the disappearance of these sex worlds. So we put some deep insights into the way in which gender and sexuality and ascribed in urban landscapes, but one anecdote from that book is interesting in relationship to some of Leslie's work. So Delaney talks about the way in which in public parks, women who were going to the parks with their kids really needed access to the bathrooms, which is something that Leslie's brought up a couple of times. The bathrooms had been closed down, because the city was concerned that gay men were using the bathrooms to cruise and to have sex. And this then sets up the feminist city. In a way in opposition to one version of the queer city where the queer city wants to make sort of public spaces available for certain kinds of sexual activity. The feminist city wants to create safe spaces. So how can we think about the feminist city and the queer city together. And Delaney was really using Jane Jacobs ideas there of eyes on the street to try to think through the conundrum of women and children in the park but also what about queer people in the park. What about homeless people in the park. How can these spaces be scripted in such a way that all, you know, all different communities who want to enter into these public and common spaces have the ability to do so without producing new forms of policing that are directed by one group against another. And finally, I think it's really important, you know, given the moment that we live in given all the black lives matter protest given the intense policing of black bodies in cityscapes. I was thinking also about Saidiah Hartman's book way with lives and about the various laws on in New York City over the past century that have literally been directed. So how does race work within this paradigm and then finally, one of my pet peeves has been the enormous amount of energy time and resources put into creating dog runs in cities like the preference that the, the, you know, the kind of packaging of projects around pets and animals over. And I'm not saying over human projects, I'm just saying, why are we so full of ideas about how dogs can relieve themselves how dogs can get enough exercise. And yet we seem to draw a blank when it comes to how can we make the city a more collective space. How can we share space in ways that push to one side completely the mechanisms of policing. The history of the city in ways that unburden us of these deep histories of racial division class division and gendered danger. Okay, so those are big questions but nestled within them are some specific questions each for Leslie and Anna. And I'm happy to, you know, we can go back and forth as a conversation or but you know why don't we go first Anna and then Leslie and then we'll see what we have. A lot to, to answer. I'll try to answer most of it. I will start with Grace, because it's the last question did you throw me and actually I, I, I was doubting to address it during my talk and I decided to leave it for the Q&A because I was sure that I was going to be asked and I really thankful that you did. Obviously New York at the time was deeply racialized deeply. So most of these apartment houses were inhabited mostly by white pop and white citizens and but not only not all of them and and one of the case that were it was probably was the most well known was the Teresa Hotel in Harlem that African Americans could not leave their until 1940. It was actually at the moment of the decay of this typology when the hotel enter into a deep crisis and was sold to an African American and that changed the policy. So, yes, they were deeply racialized as many other things of the time in New York. And, and I think that those we have to, I mean at the same time, I'm, my interest is to unveil that reality because it has been neglected by the fact that lack of apparently lack of any ideology, which that's not true. But then obviously it was left as outside of the scope in those texts that were published in the 80s about this feminine material feminist. But that doesn't mean that those typologies were actually deeply linked with what was going on and what was discussed. And as Charlotte Perniglielmans, as Doris Hayden mentioned, she was claiming for apartment hotels and always complaining that developers were not promoting that, but that was not actually true. It was not true in all the cities. So I think that that's that's interesting to just be aware of, but that doesn't deny it. Obviously, obviously they were really finding how reproductive labor was done. And probably they were deconstructing the division of gender in that relation. But that doesn't mean necessarily the division in relations with class, for instance. So they were generating other divisions. And I think that that's really important to be aware of. In terms of actual practices and gender, I have researched about a collective kitchen in Peru that thanks to collective cooking actually women achieve a political voice and domestic labor suddenly became something collective. And what I'm happy is that that practice influenced a lot of other practice in the last decades and they're really new ones. Most of them have emerged after 2008 crisis. And what I'm really happy to see is that the new practices, not necessarily are related with any specific gender. So domestic labor is not categorized as something that has to be performed by specific gender, but rather it's not even discussed, which I think that it's super interesting. Domestic labor for the first time has been discussed as something that it's actually an issue because it's poorly paid when it's paid. As Leslie was mentioning, it lacks of a lot of social rights. It's mostly not legalized in most of the countries. So I think I'm totally aligned with some of the claims that Leslie were putting on the table and I'm going to give you the word Leslie. Okay, thank you. Yeah, I'll start with this, maybe this first question about who is the woman of the feminist city. Yeah, such a great question. I mean, I try to make the point in the book that this is not a vision of like replacing the kind of unspoken male cis heterosexual able bodied man at the center of planning with a woman who kind of looks just like him but you know has a skirt basically. And that that is not actually going to get us terribly far in terms of a level of radical changes. But what what I would say about this and, and you know jack mentioning like how to gender and architecture how can they work together to actually break down this very problematic gender binary and assumptions about heterosexuality and the family and to me I think that the spaces around us are actually part of continually producing and reproducing a notion of binary gender of a static gender and of heterosexuality as the norm. So I think that there is potential in if we change our spaces that we can start to shake that up and and honestly one of the ways in which I just see this play out in like a very tangible way is you know people of my generation, people who are feminists like oh you know, of course my my household will be equal in terms of domestically burn of course my career will be prioritized just as much as my male partners. And then they move to the suburbs and all falls apart. And it's not just because of like their individual failures to live up to their ideals but there is actually something about the space that is so like powerful and kind of shaping these sorts of social relations that people with all of their best of intentions like find themselves kind of shoved back into these narrow kind of boxes around gender roles, family types, career, all that sort of thing so to me there there is hope and I love these ideas about you know I'm building dismantling as kind of part of that project because I think unbuilding certain things like the home is also unbuilding gender at the same time. And I guess I'll segue into the second set of questions around like ideas about the queer city and notions of safety and questions about gentrification and yeah these things are all like so tangled up my my sort of my main academic area of research is actually gentrification and and gender. Yeah, I mean, where do I want to go with this so many different directions like to me one of the points that I wish I had even said more like in the book is that notions about women's safety and ideas about safety for women cannot be used as tools to oppress and continue to over police and be violent towards other communities. And I mean I love that we've been able to have these conversations now thanks to Black Lives Matter about defunding the police and we'll sometimes hear these arguments like well what about violence against women. Right if we defund the police, what about violence against women isn't that a big problem you're always talking about violence against women. Yes, but like to have the police actually ended violence against women or have helped with violence against women as a problem either in the home or in public spaces I think largely know. So all of the things that we could be funding whether it's childcare, affordable housing, social services, education, training, health care, those would go a lot further towards ending violence against women that anything that we could task police forces with doing. So I kind of continually want to like be pushing pushing that point as I talk about the feminist city so that we don't end up in this kind of slippery like but what about safety what about violence, because to me the roots of that are are going to be much better address or the whole other array of social and spatial interventions beyond policing. Okay, I'll just try, you know, ask one other question that will maybe bring these two projects together and then we'll go look in the chat and in the questions and answers and take some questions from the audience but you know both of you sort of suggested that COVID is both a kind of intensifier of the inequalities that already exist within social political and environmental frameworks, but that also there are certain opportunities that are available in this moment of crisis precisely because so many of the contradictions, with which we usually seamlessly live have been exposed right. So I wanted to ask about some of the opportunities that may or may not be available in this moment of crisis for thinking about what you both seem to be gesturing towards those opportunities, which is a kind of utopian city built to a queer and feminist frame. And what about these collective, you know, and COVID is such a tricky framework precisely because the paradox of COVID is that all contradictions are laid bare, but COVID is limited by the mandate for social distancing. So, you know, take New York City, your area of research, Anna, where you know we see that potentially within a year, the entire restaurant industry is going to be decimated and suggest to the point where we will have to reimagine completely eating out. Is there any possibility Anna that one of the consequences of this is that people will turn away from the kind of consumer orientation to going out for food, and turn instead towards sort of bubble like collectivities within which food is made and shared and distributed within very rigid safety precautions and would such a project be able to draw on some of the research that you've done and some of the collective projects that pre existed our deeply privatized and consumer oriented moment. And then in in relationship to that Leslie, I mean one of your, your big ideas at the end was blow up the family which you both offered us and then you kind of withdrew from. And dive deeper into that maybe. You know, Sophie Lewis's work in her book full surrogacy now has has suggested the family has has proven to be a very fragile and unsustainable unit in COVID. It seems to me that some of your research Leslie may in fact be deepening the arguments that Marxist feminists like Sophie are making for why the family is one of the least attractive structures for a household that we could have chosen for our present moment, and for the challenges that face us. So if you guys just both want to, you know, take a stab at the utopian question, and then I'll start curating some of the q amp a box questions. So in two cases that I was referring before about the share collective practice contemporary share for the collective practices, as I mentioned both emerge after the crisis and one in Mexico City due to the economical crisis that hit largely the middle and in order to empower and generate new labor. It was actually a governmental decision they started to promote to sell food from home and suddenly they started to promote that food could actually operate as community kitchens and and to generate also labor understanding that that action of cooking could be paid, and it was extremely successful. It's a bottom up top down the organization so actually everyone has to do a little bit in order to decrease the cost of the food and and and it's been extremely successful and the other case that also provides a lot of kind of hope is in Japan. In the last 10 years, maybe less eight years, due to the two big earthquakes 1995 and 2011 Japanese Society realized about the lack of a social fabric and there was a huge need to reestablish new ways of new structures of family new family structures that not necessarily needed to be blood related but community related and a lot of collective kitchens have emerged. Just to they operate, not in a daily basis one into one in a while as places of community to produce community social bonds but also to help to be in help for neighbors and they're really growing and when I'm talking about when my interest about these kitchens is that they do operate in a level so in there are hundreds of them in Mexico and hundreds of them in Tokyo so it's not just a community you know trying to change the world is a huge network that understand that caring is actually should be a public infrastructure as the libraries do provide for the public and that's the huge change of mentality. And about the family I think that it's a great and very, very good question. Leslie, let's see how you answer that that's a really difficult one. No, thank you for the question and I apologize from shying away from blowing up the family. But, but I absolutely agree I mean the family has proven to be just, I mean even on the, even from a kind of to me as sort of an economic argument isn't terribly inefficient way of organizing society and I confess I was peeking at one of the q amp a couple of questions and someone mentioned climate change and I think you know is very energy inefficient, the single family home and the ways in which we provide care and all of the immense amount of energy that both like human energy and nature's changes that it takes to, you know, keep this unit going and I think if nothing else changes if COVID doesn't change it eventually climate change and energy crises will change the way that we do the family and the home so to me I think changes coming right it's just whether we want to like intentionally and proactively change it or whether we're forced to change it because we literally cannot survive with the with the unit that we have. And with the family, and you know it's confinement in this space that we call the home the family is something that is used as like a weapon against people who don't fit in to those norms and it's a boundary that includes and excludes people from all sorts of resources right I mean we and if you think about what it means to blow up the family and blow up the home it means blowing up the tax code blowing up property law blowing up citizenship rules. All sorts of things right we're so that that are all kind of layered together and you know from a geographer planners perspective we can think about space as being one of those layers as well for all of those things come together so one place of intervention you know if you're not changing the tax code might be well okay what can we do about about the home. So, yeah recognizing that that this is a question that involves like basically any layer that we could think about in in society but recognizing the ways in which it has continually functioned as this boundary of inclusion and exclusion and the lines of race class sexuality gender ability age citizenship, and so on and realizing that yeah if we are moving towards some kind of utopian more inclusive vision than the family as we know it is not the unit that's that's going to get us there. Okay well I definitely think we're agreed on that. Okay, let me let me refer to some of the questions. There are two kind of short questions that I maybe will offer up for you guys to think about individually and then I'll take us through a few of the comments that are on the chat as well. Alison is is asking you Leslie, whether there are any favorite examples that you have of communities that are doing a better job of distributing care networks, you know, in your book do you have any particular examples of better systems of care. And I know somebody wanted to ask where were these private questions that could operate as community kitchens, I don't know what that refers to but maybe it's in relationship to the work in Lima. There's an architect wonder felt those were anonymous questions wonder felt from Vancouver is remembering her own thesis research from the 90s on the importance of supports in neighborhood community to make women's lives as fulfilling and rich as possible. And she says that she looked a lot at individual projects like housing for homeless housing for youth shelters for women, housing and support for people dealing with mental and physical illness and I think they're nested within that comment are some questions about, for example, homelessness and how homelessness might fit into either the work on kitchens on the one hand and feeding people who are outside of housed reality altogether. And homelessness in relationship to a feminist city and, you know, just a question there about whether these collective projects that we're conjuring how they, they, they might either eliminate the problem of homelessness altogether by getting rid of the focus on private property, for example, or whether there's a kind of solution embedded within them. And I like to say that homelessness is not the problem the problem is home fullness that some people have too many homes or too much investment in the home which then makes the social structure completely weighted towards property, and is inevitably going to reduce the relative scale dispossession. So what about homeless people within these projects. Why don't we start there. So care communities homelessness. The private kitchen to the community kitchen in relationship to youth shelters homelessness and other social justice projects. I'm going to jump in Leslie. Let me, I think, well, about the private kitchen it's really easy it's the Mexico one that basically there's a law in Mexico City that you can, well, you need to apply for it but you can operate a collective kitchen in your private kitchen if you have a space, a bit large which is quite easy in homes. And that's a fast answer. I think that the conversation about home and home ownership is extremely interesting, because it's true that socially speaking, we have a bond with the idea of home. And in history there, we have, you know, we know that we have had really perverse systems to the point of, you know, the woman's that if you lack of a home, and obviously you just homeowners could be male but if you lack of a home, you were not even able to have a voice a political voice in the police so you were not able to even consider a citizen and some it's that that that happened far away right and long time ago, but something of that still exists. So the idea of being homeless is deeply badly perceived and and one of the things that I was fascinated by this typology of the 19th century with share amenities was the fact that actually rooms could be, you know, be used depending on the time. So suddenly the limits of your home, what so you could cut home were not that clear and that sharp. Not only because you could expand the apartment and reduce it but also because we're just your home staff at the land was not that it was much more diffuse. And I think that little steps architecturally speaking towards that direction would help to start understanding our home, not as a fixed entity, but something that is much more open and diffuse, and which limits are blurred. And probably in the future, we would understand that actually our home is the city at large, which is much more related with the way actually we do inhabit our the city nowadays the city, and we get rid of certain cliches that put a lot of physical mental boundaries on us. So, I'm, you know, realizing many, many months too late that I should always come to these events with a list of positive examples because there's literally a question that I get every time and I was like, oh, not that it's a bad question, but that I'm not like better prepared with like all of these like great examples to pull out of out of my pockets. And I may have also given the impression that the book is more about like care work than it actually is it's just that this has been the conversation that has really taken over the moment to give in the time that the book came out in the US and the UK. But I guess I would, I would answer that by saying that there are like, I think you can look anywhere in any city and you can find examples of people who are doing things differently, you know, we can find co housing projects that exist we can find you know, immigrant and refugee reception centers that have communal kitchens where people come together for everything from education and language classes to meals to craft making to childcare, all those sorts of things so I think that there are these pockets that we can see different things being done and I think we also there's examples of like the kind of legal challenges to ideas about the family that are going on, you know, in a Canadian example is, you know, two, two women who were friends and one had was a single mother and and her child had some pretty severe disabilities and the two women were able to pose like adopt the child essentially, even though they were not in a conjugal relationship they were just friends and that was actually kind of a precedent setting law. There's another case right now about, you know, just a couple one of whom is a gay man who had sex with his best friend was a woman and they had a baby and the question is like, are they a family right even though they're not going to continue in a conjugal relationship and the law said well actually they could be considered in that way so I think we're seeing these moments where people because our lives, most people's lives don't conform so neatly to this kind of long term heterosexual marriage family children that that we're starting to see ways in which both the law and perhaps our cities and spaces are going to try to take some of that into account. Okay, great and I just wanted to mention one other book that people might be interested in in relationship to care networks which is Marlon Bailey's book on black and Latino gay and trans people involved in the ball scenes in Detroit and New York City and Atlanta I think, and he has a chapter in that book which is called butch queen up in pumps, and the chapter is about the HIV AIDS crisis, and the way in which these households in the drag ball scene were, you know, absolutely stepped up and took responsibility for each other's care in ways that were not at all supported by the state or by the, you know, medical system, but offered intense forms of kinship and caregiving, mostly in the context of kind of hospice like situations. And it's just a really it's a very moving piece about caregiving that is queer, feminist, urban oriented and part of these kind of subterranean systems that are all, all around the city, but never usually factored into the mainstream narratives that emerge. Okay, final question the one that maybe you mentioned Leslie earlier, and maybe you'd like to start with this is the question of climate activism which comes from Valerio Franzone on the Q&A and she asks how can we match a gender feminist approach or politics with climate activism how does climate activism activism play into the projects that each one of you are committed to. Yeah, I see them as completely interlinked in that I don't think we can think about a kind of climate sustainable climate resilient future without radically rethinking social relations around gender race class age ability, sexuality and so on, because clearly the system as we have set it up is not sustainable and in fact those inequalities that are so built into our capitalist patriarchal heteronormative white supremacist system are the things that, to me anyways are causing the direction of the environment that is leading to climate change so I don't think there's any way that we can look to the future without taking that into account I'm heartened by you know when I see the young people that I work with as a university professor going out on climate marches and the speeches that they make are like they're very intersectional like they get that part of this problem is settler colonialism they get that patriarchy is part of the problem like they are not separating these issues out so I do have a lot of hope that for the next generation of climate activists. These questions are these interlinkages are obvious they're not something that they have to force themselves to think about in tandem with one another but they are just like, they know they know it at it at a gut level. Anna, do you want to answer that. I think that's a perfect answer. Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. All right, well it's just about for the person who didn't catch it the book that I referred to is Marlon Bailey, butch queen up in pumps. There was a question about that in the box. I wanted to thank our panelists and remind you to go out and buy Leslie Stern, Leslie Burns, a wonderful book, the feminist city. And I know we're eagerly awaiting the kitchen list city. Is it out already. No. Really, very soon. The research sounds incredible. So we're, we're really looking forward to that and of course, we want to thank G SAP Lila everybody who am I lay who has helped to put this event together. It's been fantastic. And I think we can all go out and put these ideas into practice and start building that collective city. So thank you both. Thank you so much. So really appreciate you. Thank you. Thanks very much.