Abstract
Gender in the Post-Fordist Urban is not your typical book about urban studies. In an attempt at enlightening the oftentimes neglected intervention of gender in the mechanisms revolving around ‘the urban’, sociologist Marguerite van den Berg’s book makes a fresh and stimulating contribution to feminist urban studies. Moving past their usual reduction to a mere ‘critique’ (of male-dominated, mainstream urban theory) and without forgetting about class and race, the author makes the case for a thorough theorization of what she terms ‘genderfication’, an instrument in the decoding of contemporary, post-Fordist urban planning. The transitioning from Fordism to post-Fordism acquired a more challenging character for particularly those cities with strong industrial (and masculine) connotations and that, subsequently, employ forms of genderfication to remodel their past ‘macho’ mythologies and regenerate the urban as a whole. Rotterdam, the second largest city in the Netherlands, is one of those cities. It is present throughout the book as a paradigmatic case study, and not only that; in fact, the author dedicates a whole coda to the exposing of her own personal attachment to the city, in line with the transparent approach to positionality and reflexivity permeating the whole book.
A fundamental starting point, functioning as the book’s backbone as well, is the parallelism between the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism and the 1970s’ urban gender revolution, which brought about a (semi-)new sexual contract, one centred on women or, more precisely, on women as the main contemporary economic subject. This is when the idea of ‘feminizing’ cities made its début on the table of urban planners and policy makers, even though it was theorized years in advance, especially in the writings of Jane Jacobs. Femininity became a keyword in the imaginary of the future city, making Jacobs’s vision ‘an attractive alternative to the patriarchal modernist city and an opening for genderfication: for producing space for changed gender relations, for including femininity, women and children in daily city life’ (p. 27). What lies behind such an apparent promising façade, however, is a much more complex reality. Van den Berg dissects such underlying mechanisms with the help of two main concrete examples from Rotterdam’s recent history: ‘La City’ festival and the ‘City Lounge’ project. Emerging from their analysis is a more accurate portrait of how ‘femininity’ is invoked and productive of an exclusive restyled Rotterdam, aiming at a future city where the population more adequately fits its economic, service-sector purposes by either attracting citizens of certain demographics (i.e. the ‘prospect rich’), or by making a more long-term investment, through the targeting of the children that will eventually grow up and inhabit it.
What surfaces from this analysis are critical accounts that make the reader reflect on contemporary urban marketing, planning and policy-making tactics, well beyond the specific case of Rotterdam. As a matter of fact, when investigating what lies behind said planning strategies, especially in the ‘City Lounge’ case, the author brings class and, inevitably, race factors into the picture. Thereby, a clearer perspective presents itself: while, on the one hand, opportunities and entry points arise for women along with urban genderfication processes, one has to be attentive of underlying implications. A very specific woman (read: mother) is indeed the target of those strategies, entailing that a significant portion of the population, both class- and ethnic-wise, is going to be left out: Higher educated ‘pink-collar’ women are explicitly targeted by entrepreneurial ‘city marketing’ and ‘urban planning’ strategies … Space is produced for post-Fordist gender notions and a post-Fordist sexual contract: one in which women are involved in consumption and paid labour, in which (heterosexual) parents are both active in the reproductive realm of childcaring, families with children reside in the city and in which, therefore, women and children are an important presence in the urban. (pp. 103–104)
Therefore, it seems that no space is left for those not subscribing to such precise standards, who are being left behind in the name of feminization in order for the future population to match what is needed for the emerging service economy to definitively replace the industrial sector so beloved in the Fordist era. Illustrative of this is, once again, the ‘City Lounge’ case: the city centre is being given a fresh (and feminine) remodelling based on ‘shopping, playgrounds, cocktails and yoga’ (p. 69), thereby making space for the white, middle-class women and their families while subtracting it from what the author calls masculine ‘surplus populations’: non-white and working-class men. At the same time, children enter the game as fundamental components of such a vision, and their mothers are identified as the vehicles leading to it, which the author thoroughly explains making use of ethnographic data on parenting guidance practices in Rotterdam.
In conclusion, Gender in the Post-Fordist Urban is the right book to read in order to acquire insights on urban regeneration from an original perspective, which however makes a coherent, valid point providing the readers with tools that may be useful in the understanding of a broader context, definitely ranging beyond Rotterdam’s, and possibly detecting recurrent patterns in urban renovation strategies in the post-Fordist world. Moreover, moving away from the urban and looking at such processes with an informed eye will possibly change the reader’s perspective on what is surely a hotly debated topic nowadays. In fact, feminization processes are not only present in urban discourses: generally, a trend is present pointing to the increased and increasing inclusion of women in contemporary society. The parallelism is straightforward with the feminization of contemporary consumer culture, whereby a whole new market arose exclusively targeting women or, more specifically (and following van den Berg’s line of reasoning), young, white and middle-to-high-class women who can afford to overpay for the ‘girly’ version of a product and to ‘keep up’ with the lifestyle. Gender in the Post-Fordist Urban will make the reader wonder what is behind the veil of appearances. From a feminist perspective Angela McRobbie, the prominent sociologist cited extensively throughout the book, notably formulated the theory of ‘double entanglement’, according to which feminist claims are increasingly taken into account by all relevant social, political and economic institutions, producing a sense of achieved empowerment on the side of women themselves, however hiding how the ‘taking into accountness’ of those claims only serves the purpose of making the public perceive feminism as something that is ‘no longer needed’ (McRobbie, 2009: 12). This is only one example proving how van den Berg’s book constitutes a relevant starting point – and critical perspective – from which the various interpretations of contemporary phenomena of ‘feminization’ can arise, and is also part of a proactive feminist literature that is much needed today.