Women, Neighbourhoods and Everyday Life

Abstract

The paper discusses everyday life in urban neighbourhoods from a feminist perspective. It aims to engage theoretically and through reference to research in progress with everyday life as a concept which brings to the foreground of enquiry the richness and variety of everyday experience and helps to approach urban life and urban development as 'peopled and gendered' processes. Everyday life is connected to places where women and men live, work, consume, relate to others, forge identities, cope with or challenge routine, habit and established codes of conduct-i.e. neighbourhoods, understood as one important urban spatiality, among many. In the context of geographical debate on space/place, the paper approaches neighbourhoods not as bounded places (although this is not absent from the urban experience), but rather as particular constellations of social relations, with local and supralocal determinants, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus. In such constellations of relations, the intersecting patterns of everyday life of different women determine individual and collective identities and contribute to develop strategies which organise the everyday both as adaptation and recurrent small decisions and as particular practices and general priorities. In turn, adaptations and challenges are determined by urban spatialities and temporalities.