Gendering Urban Space in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa [Paperback]

The essays in this book critically examine the ways in which gendered subjects negotiate their life-worlds in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African urban landscapes. They raise issues surrounding the city as a representative site of personal autonomy and political possibilities for women and/or men.Contents: Introduction; K.Ali & M.Rieker Colonial Urban and Marginalization: Prostitution in the Quartier Reserv? of Casablanca; D.Maghraoui Remapping Beirut; M.Yahya Gendered Geographies in the Making of Modern Cairo; M.Rieker Morphology of Social Flows: Segregation and the Public Sphere in Aden; S. Dahlgren Could the Men Move: Women Workers and the Changing Public Sphere in Karachi; K.Ali Elsewhere: Vernacular Cosmopolitanism and Nation-building in the Steel towns of India; S.Roy Practices of Convertibility in Inner City Johannesburg and Douala; A.Simone Race, Security and Spatial Anxieties in the Post-Apartheid City; T.Bloom Hansen Hot Issues, Cool Attitudes; or the Unmaking of a Muhajir Working Class; O.Verkaaik

Wide-reaching in its range of localities in the Global South, Rieker and Ali s framing argument for this collection of essays interrogates the efficacy of immutable epistemologies of urban space in modernist discourse . . .this powerful volume reveals through the lens of everyday stories how social space becomes a mediation of radical politics - at the conjuncture, the crossroads of the micrological stories of the everyday and the macrological dimensions of power. - Journal of Middle East Women s Studies

The engaging essays in this book fill a major gap in our understanding of the dynamics of city space in the Global South - its gender dimension. An instructive volume. - Asef Bayat, Director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM), and ISIM Professor at Leiden University, The Netherlands.

MARTINA RIEKER is Associate Director, Institute for Gender and Women's Studies at the Aló;