Invisible bodies, hostile cities: towards an intersectional urbanism of pain, care, and justice.
The modern city was built on the assumption that all bodies are the same: equally capable, healthy, autonomous, and productive. But there exists an entire geography of pain that contradicts this fiction. It is the geography of those living with invisible chronic illnesses—often silenced, medically neglected, and culturally marginalized: vulvodynia, endometriosis, pelvic neuropathies, interstitial cystitis, fibromyalgia, and complex, persistent gynecological conditions. Bodies that suffer but go unseen. Bodies that seek space but encounter obstacles.
These bodies are not exceptions—they are multitudes. Yet their experiences remain peripheral both in health discourses and in urban design. Intersectional urbanism, in this sense, is not merely a spatial theory—it is a political practice of care. It calls for rethinking the city starting from those who do not fit the model of the ideal citizen: fast, efficient, resilient, and silent. It asks us to listen to those who move through public space in pain, with effort, with a constant need to lean, to isolate, to stop, to change position, to care for themselves. It demands a city that welcomes even those who cannot perform.
The body thus becomes a political site—not only because it is shaped by norms and power structures, but because it is a ground for resistance and demand. Those who suffer claim a right to space, not just a right to care. They call for cities with accessible, free restrooms—without mandatory purchases or humiliating checks. They call for soft surfaces to sit on—not for consumption, but out of necessity. They ask for corners of respite, moments of pause, architectures that contain rather than expose.
But this transformation cannot be left to the goodwill of designers alone. It requires collective responsibility. It requires support from the State, local governments, and the National Health Service, which must extend the concept of health beyond hospitals and clinics, recognizing that the urban environment is also part of healing—that even a public restroom, a bench, a sheltered space are health infrastructures. We need a public ethic of care that is not outsourced to private solutions or individual resilience, but built through alliances between body politics and spatial politics.
To start again from the body in pain means to redefine the very project of the city. It means declaring that there can be no spatial justice without bodily justice. That the freedom to move, rest, and exist in space must not depend on one's health condition or the invisibility of their pain. Ultimately, it means that a just city is a city that listens.
