Leslie Kern wants your city to be feminist. An intrepid feminist geographer, Kern combines memoir, theory, pop culture, and geography in this collection of essays that invites the reader to think differently about city spaces and city life.

From the geography of rape culture to the politics of snow removal, the city is an ongoing site of gendered struggle. Yet the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping new social relations based around care and justice.

Taking on fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, and the joys and perils of being alone, Kern maps the city from new vantage points, laying out a feminist intersectional approach to urban histories and pathways towards different urban futures.

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•   ‘Upward-thrusting buildings ejaculating into the sky’ – do cities have to be so sexist? – The Guardian

• ‘As Women, The Cities We Live In Aren’t Built For Us.’ – Refinery 29

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Owl’s Nest Books (Calgary) | Calgary Public Library 

From the author of the best-selling Feminist City, this urbanite’s guide to gentrification knocks down the myths and exposes the forces behind the most urgent housing crisis of our time.

Gentrification is no longer a phenomenon to be debated by geographers or downplayed by urban planners – it’s an experience lived and felt by working-class people everywhere. Leslie Kern travels to Toronto, Vancouver, New York, London, and Paris to look beyond the familiar and false stories we tell ourselves about class, money, and taste. What she brings back is an accessible, radical guide on the often-invisible forces that shape urban neighbourhoods: settler-colonialism, racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, and more.

Gentrification is not inevitable if city lovers work together to turn the tide. Kern examines resistance strategies from around the world and calls for everyday actions that empower everyone, from displaced peoples to long-time settlers. We can mobilize, demand reparations, and rewrite the story from the ground up.

GET THE BOOK

Owl’s Nest Books (Calgary) | Calgary Public Library

BE CURIOUSER

• It’s not all coffee shops and hipsters: what we get wrong about gentrification. -The Guardian