Leslie Kern – författare

What should a metropolis for working women look like? A city of friendships beyond Sex and the City. A transit system that accommodates mothers with strollers on the school run. A public space with enough toilets. A place where women can walk without harassment. Through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities are built into our cities, homes, and neighbourhoods. She maps the city from new vantage points, laying out a feminist intersectional approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future. It is time to dismantle what we take for granted about cities and to ask how we can build more just, sustainable, and care-full cities together.

Young, single women emerged in the late 1990s as powerful consumers in the wave of real estate development that was reshaping the landscape of cities. Reports claimed that condominium ownership offered women new-found freedom, financial independence, and personal security. But has home ownership truly empowered women, or were the reports merely celebratory rhetoric that disguised more disquieting trends?To get at the reality behind the rhetoric, Sex and the Revitalized City explores the phenomenon from the perspective of planners, developers, and women condo owners to reveal that women's relationship with the city is being remade in the image of fast capital and consumer citizenship. As filtered through condominium ownership, neoliberal ideologies are not freeing women from constraints – they are reinforcing patriarchal norms. This fresh look at urban revitalization exposes the notion of women's emancipation through condominium ownership as a marketing ploy rather than a major shift in gender relations.

Feminist City is an ongoing experiment in living differently, living better, and living more justly in an urban world. We live in the city of men. Our public spaces are not designed for female bodies. There is little consideration for woman as mothers, workers or carers. The urban streets often are a place of threats rather than community. Gentrification has made the everyday lives of women even more difficult. What would a metropolis for working women look like? A city of friendships beyond Sex and the City. A transit system that accommodates mothers with strollers on the school run. A public space with enough toilets. A place where women can walk without harassment. In The Feminist City, through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities are built into our cities, homes, and neighbourhoods. And offers an alternative vision of the feminist city.Taking on fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, and the joys and perils of being alone, Kern maps the city from new vantage points, laying out a feminist intersectional approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future. It is time to dismantle what we take for granted about cities and to ask how we can build more just, sustainable, and care-full cities together.

Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary.Offering a new theoretical framework for understanding gentrification and displacement, this timely Research Agenda focuses on resistance as the central research area in this subject field.Arguing that the future of gentrification research should focus on accomplishing the end of gentrification, chapters provide practical organizing and policy strategies using international case studies which are rooted in community-based research.Encouraging researchers to find inspiration in new methods, sites and questions for exploring resistance, this Research Agenda seeks to empower communities and cities to reclaim urban life and city space for people by examining key issues such as housing insecurity and lived reality versus policy and practice.Graduate students and researchers of geography, urban planning and urban sociology will find the use of case studies informative and thought-provoking. The suggested practical strategies will also be beneficial for urban planners and policymakers to fight displacement and slow gentrification.

What does gentrification look like? Can we even agree that it is a process that replaces one community with another? It is a question of class? Or of economic opportunity? Who does it affect the most? Is there any way to combat it? Leslie Kern, author of the best selling Feminist City, travels from Toronto, New York, London, Paris and San Francisco and scrutinises the myth and lies that surround this most urgent urban crisis of our times.First observed in 1950s London, and theorised by leading thinkers such as Ruth Glass, Jane Jacobs and Sharon Zukin, this devastating process of displacement now can be found in every city and most neighbourhoods. Beyond the Yoga studio, farmer's market and tattoo parlour, gentrification is more than a metaphor, but impacts the most vulnerable communities. Kern proposes an intersectional way at looking at the crisis that seek to reveal the violence based on class, race, gender and sexuality. She argues that gentrification is not natural That it can not be understood in economics terms, or by class. That it is not a question of taste. That it can only be measured only by the physical displacement of certain people. Rather, she argues, it is an continuation of the setter colonial project that removed natives from their land. And it can be seen today is rising rents and evictions, transformed retail areas, increased policing and broken communities. But if gentrification is not inevitable, what can we do to stop the tide? In response, Kern proposes a genuinely decolonial, feminist, queer, anti-gentrification. One that demands the right to the city for everyone and the return of land and reparations for those who have been displaced.