Cities through a “gender lens”: a golden “urban age” for women in the global South?

Sylvia Chant

doi:10.1177/0956247813477809

Cities through a “gender lens”: a golden “urban age” for women in the global South?

Sylvia Chant

Department of Geography and Environment, LSE, London; e-mail: s.chant{at}lse.ac.uk

Abstract

Although urban women generally enjoy some advantages over their rural counterparts, a range of gender inequalities and injustices persist in urban areas that constrain their engagement in the labour market and in informal enterprises and inhibit the development of capabilities among younger women. These include unequal access to decent work, human capital acquisition, financial and physical assets, intra-urban mobility, personal safety and security, and representation in formal structures of urban governance. But the nature of these varies for different groups of women, not only on account of poverty status and where they live in the city, but also according to age, household characteristics, degree of engagement in income-generating activities and so on. This paper reviews what we have learnt from the literature on gender and urban development. It discusses disparities in access to education and vocational training and to land and housing ownership through a “gender lens”. It considers service deficiencies and associated time burdens, which limit income generation among women. Violence and gender, and gender divisions in access to different spaces within the city and in engagement in urban politics, are also covered. These factors cast doubt on whether women’s contributions to the prosperity often associated with urbanization are matched by commensurate returns and benefits.

Article Notes

Sylvia Chant is Professor of Development Geography at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she is Director of the MSc in Urbanization and Development. She has conducted research on various themes relating to Gender and Development (GAD) in Mexico, Costa Rica, Philippines and The Gambia.

Address: Department of Geography and Environment, LSE, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE; e-mail: s.chant{at}lse.ac.uk
This paper draws substantially from the lead chapter prepared for UN–Habitat’s State of Women in Cities 2012/13 (see Chant, Sylvia (2011), “Gender and the prosperity of cities”, Final draft of lead chapter prepared for UN–Habitat State of Women in Cities 2012/13, UN–Habitat, Nairobi, as well as from papers co–authored with Kerwin Datu (see Chant, Sylvia and Kerwin Datu (2011a), “Urban prosperity doesn’t automatically mean gender equality”, The Global Urbanist, September, available at http://globalurbanist.com/2011/09/27/urban-prosperity-doesnt-automatically-mean-gender-equality; also Chant, Sylvia and Kerwin Datu (2011b), “Women in cities: prosperity or poverty? A need for multi-dimensional and multi-spatial analysis”, Paper presented at The City in Urban Poverty Workshop, University College London, 10–11 November). A major debt is owed to Alice Evans, Ralph Kinnear, Steve Huxton, Chloë Last, Isik Ozurgetem, Jeff Steller and Lindsay Walton for their invaluable research assistance.