Taboos and the Feminist City. Atlas of Urban Taboos on FiloTabù.
My new article has just been published on FiloTabù:
Tabù e città femminista (Taboos and the Feminist City).
Among the many taboos inhabiting the city, the one concerning the female body is perhaps the most enduring. Not because women are absent, but because their presence in urban space has long been treated as marginal, accidental — undeserving of its own design. The modern city was built as a male space, shaped around the figure of the adult, productive, healthy man. Female bodies were removed, silenced, confined to domestic life or represented only through functional roles.
To speak of a feminist city means confronting this double taboo: the erasure of women from urban imagination, and the violence that such erasure sustains. Because violence, in cities, is not only physical aggression or exceptional events — it is also the way space itself produces fear. It dictates where and when women can move, which streets to avoid, how to hold their keys between their fingers at night. As Leslie Kern writes, “safety is not just about policing or surveillance; it’s about the right to live in the city without fear.” Yet the right to move without fear has been excluded from urban planning, as if it were not an architectural issue at all.
But the problem goes deeper than fear. Urban design has ignored the non-linear rhythms of women’s lives — the invisible work of care, the fragmented itineraries, the unpaid labour that sustains the city. Already in the 1980s, Dolores Hayden argued that “the design of the city has perpetuated the division between public production and private reproduction, rendering women’s work invisible.” The masculine city planned for home–work commutes, but not for those who combine multiple jobs, caregiving, or part-time work. It ignored mothers and non-mothers alike, women migrants and racialised women, elderly women, young women — all those for whom public space is both promise and threat.
A feminist city is not a city “for women” as a single, abstract category. It is a city that takes seriously the plurality of bodies and lives, and recognises neutrality itself as a taboo. As Ana Falú reminds us, urban violence is a form of exclusion — not only from safety, but from the right to belong. Naming this violence means revealing that space is never innocent: every sidewalk, every bus stop, every streetlight is a political choice about who can be present and who cannot.
To confront this taboo is not merely to fix dysfunctions. It means rewriting the priorities of design: redefining safety as freedom of movement, recognising care as infrastructure, and transforming difference into a right rather than an exception. The feminist city, in this sense, is not a finished model — it is a practice of unveiling, an ongoing excavation of the silences, omissions, and taboos that still shape the urban world.
The full article (in Italian) is available on the FiloTabù blog.
