Constructing the Patriarchal City: Gender and the Built Environments of London, Dublin, Toronto, and Chicago, 1870s into the 1940s

摘要

Maureen Flanagan’s book Constructing the Patriarchal City off ers an in-depth look at the ways in which male ideals about urban life and spaces shaped four Anglo cities—London, Dublin, Chicago and Toronto—and the lives of women within those cities. Th e main objective of the book is to examine how patriarchal visions of the city were for the most part successful, but that such visions were challenged by women “who had very diff erent ideas of how a city should work and how it should be built” (2). Flanagan argues that the reconstruction of the industrial city into a modern city was framed by three ideas that powerful men had about the city. First, that men viewed the urban spaces as disorderly and in need of reorganizing, through creating clear separations between public (politics) and private (domestic) spaces. Second, she argues that the powerful men saw women as a main cause of urban disorder. In better separating public and private spaces and everyday lives, women would be removed from the main workings of the modern city, resulting in an orderly city. Lastly, men see the city as a diseased organism that can be restored through the application of rational, impersonal structural solutions. Th ese three male (patriarchal) ideas of the city are used throughout Flanagan’s book to discuss the urban planning and design in each of the four cities and the diff erent ways in which women resisted.