The search for a feminist city: A case of Chandigarh
In the past 5 years I have been conducting research on women’s presence and participation in the public spaces of Indian cities. When Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade stated that women’s presence in the public sphere is contingent upon them seeming purposeful in public space, it didn’t quite seem plausible to me as a reader- as if women went around consciously pretending to have a purpose. Later as I delved deeper and deeper, mapping public spaces, what appeared was that women did not exhibit a purpose but rather were only found around places that served a purpose. The conundrum is that men on the other hand loiter (Phadke, et all.) a lot. They are able to create leisure for themselves even where there is none due to lack of anxieties about safety, they are able to access commutes, access farther places in the city, and all this while having menial participation in unpaid labour. Men and women’s experience of the city is not just different, it is almost as if they are living in two different cities. What spaces then would an equitable city produce? This demands an enquiry that covers every aspect of a city that produces gendered spaces. Chandigarh has been chosen as a site of feminist analysis and critique due to its unique position in India as a completely designed city with individual housing units, sector and neighbourhood planning. It has also been designed in a manner such that there is a hierarchy of income groups with the wealthiest living in sectors 2-9, creating a disparate socio-economic culture. Gendered issues get exacerbated at the intersection of caste and class. Additionally, due to its bye-laws, rather than growing upwards, Chandigarh has grown outward into satellite towns characterised by an insurgence of housing societies with haphazard street networks and lack of access to public transport and other public infrastructure. The transition from the city to the satellite town creates vast pockets of unsafe spaces which also become extremely important sites of analysis.
