I absolutely loved this book. It was informative, insightful and utterly compelling. Kern has such a clear, strong writing voice, and truly inspiring. I really appreciated how the book was clearly signposted, and explored different versions of womanhood and how this affects our interactions with this city/what we require from the city. My favourite chapter was 'City of Friends', as I related to it most strongly, however, I truly learnt so much from every page. It has changed the way I interact with my city, An essential read for every woman.

In the vein of Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Feminist City points out how the world was not only designed by men, but for men, leaving out the female perspective either deliberately and maliciously or out of pure ignorance. I definitely connected with this book as a young professional woman who lives in a city - I love when a book makes you realize that these seemingly innate habits we develop are actually a response to a patriarchal environment and you go "Oh yeah, that's why that sucks." This book is well-written, accessible, and deeply compelling (at least to me). I don't have any formal background in geography or urban planning and I expected that to be a detriment, or that I would at least have to do some Googling to follow the arguments, but I was pleasantly surprised at the lack of jargon and clear explanation of specific subtopics in those fields. All in all, I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the subject matter—and if I didn't reserve my five star ratings for books that literally changed my life, this would be an easy five stars.

I didn't love this one and it didn't draw me in like I was hoping! However, I appreciated the author's spin on a "feminist city" and the expansive worldview.

This book examines the ways in which urban areas are designed without the foresight of women's needs and how these designs and issues exacerbate issues of intersectional feminism. As a scholar I enjoyed the prose of this book, but I think someone uninterested in the research side of these issues would be frustrated with this book, as it does not offer much in way of solutions or insight for activists and city planners.

Concise, scholarly, and personal survey of feminist geography of the city, looking at how cities are designed to perpetuate comfort and power for certain members of society (mass transit systems more often than not are set up for funneling white collar workers to and from urban cores and not for making it easy to do inter- or inner-city trips to school, errands, work, and back again) and how cities can be used as hotbeds of activism and social change. Has a very nice focus on intersectionality. Worth a read!

I really enjoyed this book, I give it 4 stars.

It was so refreshing and fascinating. I found myself nodding along a lot and spoke to all my friends to spark discussions.

I would recommend this book.

This is such a fantastic title. Leslie Kern masterfully combines a personal memoir and an academic book. The result is a well-researched, relatable, honest, and wonderfully readable book. Kern's approach is very intersectional and her knowledge of geography studies is impeccable. But the book is so much more than an analysis of how cities are rigged against women; she analyzes many other related things, such as media representations of female friendships and their relationships with cities; pregnancy and everyone's feeling of entitlement to a woman's pregnant body; violence of the cities' surveillance technology against people of color; white flight and the rise of suburbia, and many other aspects of the ways cities we live in are not feminist - and how they can be remade. Highly recommended.

"Any settlement is an inscription in space of the social relations in the society that built it...Our cities are patriarchy written in stone, brick, glass and concrete" - Feminist geographer Jane Darke, quoted in Feminist City

I identify as a feminist, but I'll admit I had never heard of feminist geography. This book was a concise, readable introduction to this complex topic. Kern did a great job interweaving her personal experience with her scholarship. I also really appreciated her focus on intersectional feminism; she gives concrete examples of interventions that were intended to help women but in fact hurt women of color. Kern writes in a semi-academic style, but the book is accessible to a general audience.

Readers who enjoyed Invisible Women will likely find this a good read. I would recommend this book to anyone who identifies as a feminist or wants to learn more about feminist geography.

Thank you to Verso Books for providing an ARC on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed this book! I have a background in gender studies (way back in my college days), but I had never read much from the perspective of a feminist geographer. What is feminist geography? You can think of it as the study of how gender affects how humans live in, interact with, and take up space in their environment. This book focuses purely on urban environments and tackles several major topics, including motherhood, friendship, safety, and protest/activism.

Due to my background I was familiar with a lot of the concepts discussed in this book, but many concepts were presented from an angle I had never considered before. The author drew some fresh connections for me that will change the way I think about urban space and my own safety and interaction with my environment.

This was a wonderful book, and an absolutely excellent synopsis of the issues women face in urban environments. The author does an excellent job tackling the topics in the book with intersectional awareness and a keen eye toward the privileges some women hold from which other women don’t benefit. This book made me more keenly aware of my privileges as a white woman.

The language in the book is plain and accessible and the author’s sources are well cited. She is transparent on her own viewpoint/privileges, and forthcoming with narratives from her own life, along with a keen analysis of her experiences. This is in addition to the excellent overview she provides of concepts and theory from feminist geography as it pertains to the topics she covers.

There were a few places I did feel the reader needed to have some basic understanding of feminist theory and race or class issues to be able to be sold on the theories presented. If I were a professor teaching this book, I would save it for after some basic reading on sexual/gendered violence, racial tensions, etc. However I think that’s okay; this book is meant to be a feminist geography introduction, not gender studies or social justice 101. However, if someone wasn’t sold on feminism, anti-racism, or social justice as a concept already, this book might seem less convincing to them because it does assume the reader has some basic familiarity with these concepts.

Overall I really really liked this book and I plan to purchase a copy when it comes out. It is also incredibly prescient for the times - I read the activism chapter on the Friday night the George Floyd protests reached a peak in my local area. It felt quite surreal, and extremely relevant.

I received a digital copy of this book from Net Galley, in exchange for an honest review.

Very well researched and a timely release. This is a must buy book. Urban women and women who wish to move to urban spaces and take up positions in the urban society can easily relate. Keep up the good work.

A very interesting academic book on women's views on the city (cities) they live in, with in-depth analysis of the gender-specific experiences of public spaces, and tons of sources to back up every argument made by the author.
To put in the hands of all your friends interested in feminism, social inequalities and the sociology of urban spaces.

3.5 stars. This upcoming non-fiction book, set to release in the U.S. on July 7 by Verso, provides a detailed exploration of the ways in which the key concepts of intersectional feminism interact and are exacerbated by urban spaces and urbanism more broadly. If this is a subject that interests you, and you are looking for an academic perspective on this topic (that is still fairly readable) I would recommend you check this out. Kern is a strong writer and this book has five clear chapters ("City of Moms," "City of Friends", "City of One", "City of Protest", and "City of Fear") that utilize a variety of sources, ranging from academic texts, trade publishing books, and media entertainment like t.v. shows and movies, to provide examples of different ways women (and other marginalized groups) use cities or struggle to use cities.

Personally, however, this book felt a bit too academically-focused for me. As someone who is looking to enter the urban planning profession, I was hoping this would be a bit more of a solution and case-study based approach to examining how cities can be created with a gendered lens and how intersectional feminism can be utilized in producing more equitable, usable cities. Instead, Kern relies heavily on what is typical in academic writing (something that I personally have grappled with regarding academia more broadly): a critique of existing systems without providing solutions. While I completely understand the use of critique in the greater academic canon, I still personally prefer more solution-based non-fiction with a subject matter such as this. This did lower my rating, but I believe that may be in part because of my expectations of what Feminist City would be, as I do find the content of this to be important and the work itself to be cohesive and well-written!

I really enjoyed this book about feminist geography. This is a topic that I often see being briefly mentioned in books about feminism, but I never read a book that focused on only covering this topic. I believe people don't give it enough attention.

There were many things I liked about this book. Some specific topics I was already aware of, but it was still very interesting to read more about them. Others surprised me because, even though they are fairly obvious once someone points it out, I have not given them enough of my attention in the past.
What I enjoyed the most was that the book felt inclusive from page 1. It was a very natural way of including everyone, which I prefer over the sort of "forced inclusivity" we see nowadays. And this book had a couple of moments when that was present too. It's like we need to mention the same speech every time, so people get that we are inclusive. And this book was doing that already in the natural way I mentioned, hence why this bothered me slightly.
The author and I disagree in a couple of topics and that's absolutely fine. My ideology doesn't have to be the same as every single feminist.

Overall, I highly recommend this book. It has very important information that people need to be aware of in order for the world to move forward.

“Feminist City” investigates the impact of the white patriarchy on how women navigate urban spaces. Although it’s something that I hadn’t really thought about until now, it immediately made sense to me. I knew that when NASA began recruiting women astronauts, the biggest hurdle was that all the equipment was designed by men, for men, so either women had to adjust how they used it (a difficulty in addition to, you know, SPACE FLIGHT), or NASA had to spend the money to overhaul everything. So the idea that cities have been built by, overwhelmingly, straight white men, for straight white men, and exclude how literally everyone else uses cities, putting them in the most vulnerable positions? Yep, I’m there, tell me more.

It explores the breadth and depth of city life, how different people use public areas and how they’re clearly designed for men without children and periods. The book is enlightening and the problems it spotlights are endlessly frustrating. I wish there were clear, easy answers to how to make a city not only safe but also navigable and useable for marginalized people, and it’s not the book’s fault that the answers so far are few.

This year, my goal is to read all the books on Kate Harding’s syllabus for “A Master Class in Woman’s Rage,” and “Feminist City” should 100% be added to it. It’s comprehensive and well written, and it brought the receipts. It’s going to be the go-to book for anyone looking to overhaul the patriarchal leanings of traditional urban planning and redesign.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

A much needed book in a world that is changed faster than ever. Reminds me very much of the book Invisible Women. A must-read for everyone

This book takes a unique aspect of gender equality, examining how the subtleties in our world can reflect the gender norms and sexism of our society. I really appreciated this take, since the macroscale subject matters of equal pay and domestic violence have been well documented, but the microcosm of these issues is still often misunderstood.

I really wanted to like this book based on the summary that I read, but I was not able to get past the very poor formatting of this Kindle copy. My apologies to the author. I would very much like to read and finish this book, but the formatting is just too much to overcome.

This book was difficult to read. The formatting was terrible for the kindle download so I did not finish. DNF