“A general understanding of prevention of gender-based violence can often be around what you would call sanitized public spaces and they are often very, very oppressive to persons of different identities, they involve a certain gentrification of areas. They do not account for the realities of the communities that live there and how they might have navigated those spaces all their lives and what safety might mean to them and what stakeholders in that community might make them feel safe… even just the presence of vendors you’ve known all your life is a measure of safety for a lot of us.”
— Vandita Morarka on protectionism and reimagining public spaces through a feminist perspective in this episode of the In Search of Justice Podcast, along with Ruchika and Sneha Visakha, research fellow at Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.
The politics of who gets to access which spaces is so deeply embedded in our everyday lives that it informs almost all our choices: where to eat, sleep, rest, unwind, work. In recent times, feminist scholars have demonstrated how the systematic exclusion of women from public spaces can be countered with loitering. Loitering as a feminist response may seem to make little sense at first, but it turns out public spaces can actually, effectively be reclaimed by loitering. How do our identities shape the spaces we can access? How can loitering be a form of resistance? Can we design and construct cities along feminist lines? In this episode of the podcast, co-hosts Vandita Morarka and Ruchika are joined by Sneha Visakha as they search for the answers to these questions, and many more.
Content Warning: This conversation includes mentions of assault, rape, and mental, emotional, physical and institutional violence.
***
Love to read or want to revisit your favourite bits? Dive into the full transcript below!
Ruchika
Hello everyone, Welcome to another episode of the In Search of Justice podcast. I am Ruchika.
Vandita
And I’m Vandita.
Ruchika
And we are your co-hosts on this journey to navigate what Justice is. Today, we’re going to specifically explore something extremely interesting that isn’t often featured in our conversations on Justice or even on feminism for that matter very often, and I’m actually looking forward to learning a lot from our guests. Our episode is going to focus on justice and urban planning and public safety.
Vandita
Content Warning: Before we begin, we’d just like to give you a trigger and content warning that there will be mentions of rape, sexual, physical, mental assault, and also other forms of gender-based violence. We will be discussing justice especially in the context of gender-based violence, and it may be difficult to listen to based on where you’re at and how you’re feeling right now. We encourage you to prioritize how you’re feeling and step back and away from the podcast if you feel like it’s getting too much and come back to it when you feel up to it.
Ruchika
Thanks Vandita. So, Vandita, you’ve mentioned in a couple of our past episodes that courts have structured physically separate entrances for cases of GBV, so the survivor doesn’t have to physically interact with the perpetrator. And actually, that was when I first started thinking of how we plan space and design space and how that can impact justice or processes around justice or involving justice. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?
Vandita
Thanks for asking and bringing that up, Ruchika. I know that then I was speaking about more courtroom infrastructure, but a lot of my work has focused around how we can build spaces that nurture the sort of relationships and communities that can then lead to a reduction in gender-based violence and also sort of break away from a very Western idea of what sort of public spaces prevent gender-based violence, right? A general understanding of prevention of gender-based violence can often be around what you would call sanitized public spaces and they are often very, very oppressive to persons of different identities, they involve a certain gentrification of areas. They do not account for the realities of the communities that live there and how they might have navigated those spaces all their lives and what safety might mean to them and what stakeholders in that community might make them feel safe and remember, I was talking to you about how even just the presence of vendors you’ve known all your life is a measure of safety for a lot of us. Whereas that may not be seen as a matter of safety by, say, public officials or by people who are planning and that also often happens because the needs of different genders are not really taken into account while designing spaces. So yeah, this is where I think the idea of justice, public space and justice, gender-based violence comes for me as well. I think it’s a very largely missing conversation because we’re also often thinking about gender-based violence as something that you talk about once it already happens and we don’t see the role of space design, one as a tool of prevention and second as a space of building agency and access so that gender-based violence or harassment can be reduced or even if it’s happening, you can build more agency among survivors.
Ruchika
Thank you, Vandita. So, I’m just gonna quickly introduce our guest for today’s episode. We’re super excited to have her on with us. Hi Sneha.
Sneha
Hi, Ruchika. Hi, Vandita.
Ruchika
So, Sneha is a research fellow at Advani Center for Legal Policy and also hosts the phenomenal, phenomenal podcast The Feminist City, which I’ve learned a lot from. That’s actually kind of where we got the idea for this episode from. Would you like to quickly tell us something about yourself and your works, Sneha?
Sneha
Yeah, for sure. First of all, thank you so much. That is so nice of you and I mean, I guess it’s always great to hear that the work that you do is getting people to think about the things that you care about. And so just to give you a brief intro, I work as a research fellow at Advani Center for Legal Policy. My background is in law and literal arts. I predominantly worked in the areas of Urban Development, including urban heritage conservation from legal perspective and at the- what I work on Right now- the project is looking at urban planning from a feminist perspective.
I recently released a report called Making a Feminist City, and this is where I try to look at municipal governance and planning laws. And I’m trying to think about how to build more equitable and safer cities from a feminist perspective. And like you also mentioned another podcast which sort of tries to talk to different people who work on cities from this perspective, try to unpack different, you know, different facets of, yeah, city life.
Vandita
Sneha, your work has been extremely interesting. I think it really articulates what has been lost in terms of translating a lot of academic work into policy, and I think that’s a great space to be in to also build just public advocacy around thinking what our spaces can and should look like. So yes, thanks again for joining us. My first question for you is if you could tell us a little bit about what feminist urbanism is and also just help our audience understand what public spaces include and what they stand for.
Sneha
Feminist urbanism is an approach to sort of, I mean it’s both an approach as well as a methodical methodological tool as well as a range of practices. I think, you know, much like feminism, it’s, you know, it encompasses quite a few things. Just to give you a brief about where it comes from, I think a lot of geographers and urban planners particularly in the 1970s and- this has been happening for a while out of the women’s liberation movement that started sort of applying a feminist perspective to a wide variety of things- we are also thinking very critically about Urban Development and city planning in particular. So, feminist urbanism is basically a critical approach towards planning, which centers women, girls and gender and sexual minorities and essentially unpacks the assumptions that underlie Urban Development. Usually when we walk into the city, I think, which is at, which is something that I think a lot of feminists are engaged in, right? A lot of the structures that we move about seem very normal and natural to us, but they’re actually not. A lot of work goes into making them seem natural. I don’t know if anybody remembers, there’s a really beautiful example that Nivedita Menon gives in ‘Seeing like a Feminist’ in the opening page where she says “Patriarchy is like nude makeup., so you spend a lot of time making it look like, you know, it’s natural. So, what feminist urbanism does is denaturalize and denormalize some of these systems to show us that the city looks and feels a particular way to say, a majority of its dwellers by a specific thinking or a lack of thinking. So ultimately, when you look at the city from a feminist perspective and adopt A feminist urbanism approach, this benefits everybody because gender is one of those things that cuts across different communities and ultimately it enables the city to become safer for children, for elders, it just becomes a more accessible city. So, just to give you briefly another a couple of lines about some of the ideas from a planning perspective, it’s things like compact, mixed-use, diverse neighborhoods; which you know, people often hear the 15 minutes city as a word, which basically means that when you start walking, everything should be accessible, the neighborhoods should be compact in a way to limit urban sprawl. So, feminist urbanism is also eco-sensitive in its conception. The other thing would be something as simple as introduction or an emphasis on public infrastructure, emphasis on social services and ensuring that when you walk into the city at the point of use, almost all services should be free, easy and accessible for everyone to be used.
And then thirdly, pedestrian centric street design, so any city design that focuses on the everyday pedestrian. These are basically some of the more important tools and I think we can talk about the details and the technicalities later. The other question that you asked, thinking about public space, right, I feel like often when we think about public space, at least as a person who grew up in a city, spaces like a mall or a cinema, theater or a restaurant comes to mind, but public spaces technically should be streets, parks, lakefronts, basically anything that you walk down your home and you reach the footpath, that can be a public space- public toilets, public facilities, bus stops, bus stands. So, these are public spaces where you can enter without any charge or which are technically supposed to be open and accessible for everybody. And interestingly, even digital space could be thought of as public space.
Ruchika
Thank you for that. That’s a very sort of broad understanding of what public space is. I don’t think we’re ever taught to sort of think about public space or define public space in our everyday conversations or in school or in college or anywhere. So, I think this is super, super interesting. So, I want to ask you, how do you think safety in public spaces ties into the notion of justice?
Sneha
Okay, this is a great question. A heavy question. I mean, I think at multiple levels, right. On one hand, I think the way that I think safety would tie into public space and justice is that- one of the quotes, I’m gonna find the name of the person who said this and I’ll get back to you, when I read a quote in the due course of my research was that “every woman develops agoraphobia or nightfall in the city” and it really stayed with me because the fear that an embodied fear. I think the men, girls and gender minorities in any urban space, once they, you know, navigate the city is I think a particular type of everyday normalized violence that doesn’t allow us access to opportunities, space or just, I don’t know, you can’t take a walk when you want without constantly navigating for safety. So when we talk about justice, which is such a loaded term and concept, right? Like I think to me it isn’t “just” that, say 50% of the population in the city cannot think about accessing public space without constantly fearing for their life or body. And I think you know that it’s the fact that we navigate for safety so much- and as a lot of feminist geographers, feminist activists and writers have pointed this out – in ‘Loiter’ in particular right Shilpa Phadke, Shilpa Ranade, and Samira Khan’s book where they sort of articulate how protectionism; where parents schools and you know universities tell girls and children women not to go out after a particular point of time or to you know, where every decision that happens in your life is somehow linked to your safety, that means that all the opportunities you’ve been deprived of should also be seen a form of violence because of our understanding we often see or we construct violence in a particular way that oh, if I go out of my house and then somebody harasses me on the street or I might be more vulnerable to a particular form of sexual harassment or sexual violence, therefore, I will just not go out at all, you know, so there is like a lack of opportunity that exists. And thirdly, I think safety in public space particularly affects women from marginalized communities who do not have access to private vehicle ownership or who are already out in the streets working at night. Somehow, we have to complicate the idea of whose safety are we talking about when we talk about urban safety in public space and who is this question referring to, because I think based on that the answers will widely differ. So, I’m not sure if I answered that question, but I think it has to do with understanding the location or the social location of the women we are referring to or the girls we are talking about and how that relates to what justice means. Because like I just finished recording an episode with someone who is from a nomadic and denotified tribe. And if you belong to a group that lives in the city which is a migratory tribe and you don’t have access to things like water or sanitation or even just safe housing, so their justice then becomes- or safety is then tied to structural conditions and the political economy of the city itself.
Vandita
Definitely Sneha. I think all of what you’re sharing brings up for me a concept that we use a lot in our work as well, which is to ask people to think about how they might be living by a rape schedule, especially for a lot of women and a lot of queer people where every day from the time we wake up right within our households and when we’re accessing public spaces, we’re making all these adjustments in our life to ensure that, you know, sexual violence doesn’t occur. To expand this idea to even think about all the other identities you’re speaking of, and to think of safety even beyond gender-based violence, there are all these accommodations and adjustments we do every day in public spaces to ensure that the space, which is inherently violent, does not exert any violence towards us. So, I think everything that you shared is so important and I’ve been thinking about a lot of this a lot. I know that there’s a ‘Right to Be’ campaign also led by the amazing people at Coro that really talks about how, you know, women just can’t use a washroom in the city and it might seem like such a small thing, but it’s also so privileged because a lot of us can probably walk into a mall or go to a restaurant and use a washroom, but a lot of women can’t. And just to quickly share that a lot of gender-based violence and a lot of sexual violence happens around this, right? One of the communities I used to work with, they had one of those government toilets in their basti, but that toilet would be kept locked because the head of that person, like in that slum community, the head would store some storage grains in it and used it as his private space- this meant that the women didn’t really use the washroom all day and they would use the washroom at night. Overtime people started noticing this pattern that they would go to the washroom, like they would go to this bunch of trees at like midnight or 2:00 AM and it led to a lot of sexual violence because you were forcing them into inherently unsafe situations, knowing what people around them are like and what the prevalence of sexual harassment is like. So, thank you for sharing this. It really brought up a lot of this for me. And it really also made me think about what all I do every day to make sure that I am safe and what my idea of safety also means in general.
Sneha
What you said, right, Like, it also reminded me that this is so universally relatable for all women, but something I think this kind of narrative to me also masks, normalized structural violence at home. Because I think somewhere we constantly assume, I think often incorrectly, that the home is somehow inherently safer. It’s actually not true because I think, from the research that I have done and I think a lot of people often point this out, women are far more likely to experience violence at home. Women are far more likely to be murdered by their own families. So, the home is actually far more unsafe than public space itself, but this often also brings to me in sharper relief, the forms of violence that we normalize and the forms of violence we are constantly protecting ourselves from, which I think it is sexual violence outside that we are constantly protecting from, whereas, well, you know, marital rape is not recognized as a crime in this country and we have the sitting CJI say, you know ask these questions if the husband can even really rape a bride 2021. So, I often make a point to make that very clear when we’re talking about public space.
Vandita
No, that’s a great point. Thanks Sneha. In fact, I’m gonna take us to the next question. We’ll also link this up with the problem of urban infrastructure not being adequate, right. Often in our work around gender-based violence at home, we talk about how the only solution is not like legal help or mental health, right? It’s also (about) does your city have affordable housing? Does it have a safe house or shelter for survivors to go to? And these are also all parts of urban infrastructure and that’s something that they don’t take into account. So, you know my question for you is that I know your work centers around Urban Development and municipal governance and it’s been fascinating for us to see how tangible infrastructure is and can play such a great role in ensuring that gender-based violence is reduced or at least that survivors have support. We’d love to hear from you what these conversations are about the built environment and justice for gender-based violence? What does it look like for this to intersect?
Sneha
There is something that I mean I’m also, I also went to law school. So, you know, when you’re studying law and we talk about equality and you know, the constitutional law, which is really fascinating stuff, right. Like the right to life and right to, you know, dignity and right to equality. What I’ve realized is that while these rights are guaranteed on paper, and these are all, you know, the difference between formal equality and substantive equality, and the actual access or the realization of these rights exists in the material provision of services and infrastructure. Therefore, it’s well and good for the Supreme Court or the Constitution to say that there is a right to equality. But that manifestation has to happen in municipal law, in municipal governance and Urban Development. So, I mean to me the question then becomes who are the people who are making the decisions that regulate and govern my everyday life. So, because I think that is something that is fundamental even in the report, the focus I think a lot of feminist geographers and just researchers place is on the experiences of everyday life. So, when you ask that question, what is your everyday life, how is that impacted you suddenly unpack so many things. And like you rightly pointed out, I actually wanted to say even the right to be campaign which I just finished recording the episode and we’re putting that up with Deepa Pawar from Anupurti. She spoke so beautifully and it was such an incredible conversation for me because she was pointing out how during the pandemic, when you have toilets that need to have, like, you know, which are paid access, a large family cannot afford to pay Rs 60 to 70 per day just to access the bathroom when there are no economic opportunities. So, in order to respond to a crisis like the, you know, the coronavirus pandemic, what you need city governments (is) to actually think about the different communities and make Urban infrastructure accessible to people. I think there are a lot of questions around oh, but if you make everything free, you know, it won’t be used well or where will you get the money from? But those are exactly the questions that I think the privileged elites should be thinking about. How do you fund urban infrastructure in a way that everybody in the city irrespective of their location is able to use and access them? So, the questions around how does gender-based violence intersect with urban infrastructure is critical because on one hand, for instance, if you’re experiencing violence at home, if you’re experiencing sexual violence, physical violence or any kind of violence at home, if you want to leave your home, you should at least have a safe space to go to. How many women and girl children, even gender minorities- and that’s another thing, right? A lot of queer kids and queer communities experience violence at home. So, if you want to be safe, there should be a place that you know we (they) want to leave and go to for shelter. Second, you want to have city design made in a way that women can use because this is something that I think it’s very critical to understand the gender roles and social roles of different people; because women are seen usually as the primary caregivers for their children. They’re also looking for work, which is closer to their home. They’re looking for childcare which is closer to their home. So, you want mixed-use neighborhoods which allow for women not just of just upper class and upper-class communities, but women across different cross sections of identities to be able to have affordable and accessible childcare within their, you know, within their vicinity. And in addition to that, something as simple as you know what produces safety in the city? To me, what produces safety is not surveillance infrastructure, not cops, when cops themselves can inflict so much violence on people as a recent study that showed that the biggest perpetrators of violence against the trans community were law enforcement officials themselves. So in this regard, this safety in the city is produced by more girls occupying the city, more women occupying the city, more gender and sexual minorities occupying the city. So the way that- so this to me indicates that if you design public infrastructure thinking about the social, economic and gendered roles, not just from, you know, one perspective but from an intersectional perspective, keeping in mind the historical and contextual specificities, you can actually make and build equal and safer cities.
So, I think public infrastructure is one of the biggest sites for feminist intervention because as you pointed out, the bathroom problem is such a huge problem because so many girls and women, we don’t drink water before we go out because access to a bathroom is not a given. And as Deepa Pawar pointed out, the fact that women cannot relieve themselves in public the way that men are able to do because of, you know, just social impunity, the fact that they charge money to avail access to the bathroom also sort of weaponizes this kind of body politics into making women pay. So, there is literally a pink tax for existing in a woman’s body in a way that, you know, doesn’t happen. And the same thing with, I think, the trans and gender minorities, the fact that access to the bathroom in the city can become a site for violence is horrifying. So, I think it’s not enough that the NALSA Judgement has come out right. Like, you want these constitutional values to be reflected in your everyday environment, in your built environment, in your social environment and, you know, in your political environment.
Ruchika
Yeah. So I think a lot of what you’ve just said kind of answers the next question, but maybe there’s more examples or more specific cases you can talk about. Can we just take a moment to talk about how there are current structures of urban India that enable injustice or violence or harm to occur to women or gender minorities and maybe even how these structures are violent or harm causing themselves?
Sneha
I mean the fact that urban infrastructure is often in shambles in the city, the fact that like our footpaths are unwalkable, the fact that we have automobile centric design automatically makes the city inaccessible for a majority, not just women. Literally anyone who is not an upper-class person with access to a private vehicle, so basically the city is made-up of so many people, but Urban Development is designed around the automobile, which is a very small minority in the city. So just from the basic design and the logics of Urban Development, there is, I think, structural violence that occurs because when you walk down the city, is the city, you know, walkable? Are there even footpaths that exist in good repair for you to be able to do that? And the fact is all of these structures are also deeply ableist, so you have women or persons with disability who will not even be able to access the city in a way that they can, you know participate on an equal level, with that is not even a remote chance, right? So, I think physically as an infrastructure and design issue, so many people are excluded in the city, but one of the biggest ways is basically just the lack of streetlights, the lack of 24/7 accessible washrooms, the lack of, I mean, I don’t know how much this happens in other cities; but in Bangalore in particular, parks are shut during the day. They’re only open in the morning and in the evenings, which essentially is around the idea that a park is supposed to only be used for fitness activities. And some of this is also because of, I think, a lot of lobbying by resident welfare associations or city civic groups who are predominantly, you know, of a particular type of middle class in the city that see the use of these parks for their use. I often think about where do people go when they want to take a nap in the afternoon? And if you’re someone who works in the street and you want to have lunch, why isn’t the park open for you to go inside and sit and eat with your family? And if there are domestic workers who work in the city and are only free in the afternoons and they want to take their children somewhere the park isn’t open or young people in love If they want to just go somewhere and they don’t want to pay money, just to think of one side, right? I feel like I can give a million examples when you think of each individual public space as to how this creates a situation where there is no understanding. And I think one of the biggest ways, I think the city itself is perpetuating violence on a larger scale is this notion of the public and the private, it’s the sheer division, which then has zoning practices where residential areas are, you know, separated from commercial areas, makes it extremely difficult. So, if you’re a woman who is already underpaid and doing unpaid work at home, and in order to do paid work, you go out to do, you know, whether you work at a factory or whether you wherever your place of work has to be, if it’s really far, if you have to take multiple modes of transportation to get there. All of these things marginalize women in particular because they often don’t have access to private vehicles, even in a family that owns private vehicles.
So, I mean, I feel like when we don’t have systems that are free, equal and public infrastructure in particular, it harms women because you know, when these things don’t. I mean, the other thing is when you have an unsafe city, one of the first things that often families also do is take girls out of education. For instance, if you’re experiencing sexual harassment on the way, rather than fix that problem, often it becomes an excuse or a reason because it’s just more, you know, it’s harder to solve that problem. It’s easier to take you out of education and you know, I don’t know, get you married. There are very varied ways in which this can happen, the lack of bathrooms in schools or colleges in particular, especially when girls start menstruating, the lack of facilities also become a huge impediment for their education. So, in that way, I think structurally current urban planning and current city design, and basically constructs a deep, invisible structural violence against so many bodies in the city.
Vandita
Thanks for sharing that, Sneha. I think they were such excellent points. Just the idea that, you know, a space like what you would consider an inanimate space can also be a source of violence for so many of us. I think that’s something to really reflect upon, at least for me and I hope for all of our listeners as well because it really makes me question what I’m dealing with every time I step out of my house. What are the different barriers and what are the barriers I don’t notice because of my privileges; several barriers may not seem like those to me. And you know, this also takes me – a lot of what you said, takes me to my next question for you because I noticed ideas of protectionism also playing out in how we design our urban spaces and this protectionism can be towards, you know, the idea of our women, but it can also be about protecting our women from a certain category of people, right? Like you mentioned earlier, why loiter touches upon this quite beautifully. So, my question is that you know, how does protectionism play out when we construct public spaces and what is it that is harmful about this protectionist perspective to urban infrastructure.
Sneha
Protectionism is the go-to method for the paternalistic state. I think every time, like, I feel like every time the question of women’s safety comes up and women’s safety also becomes a Trojan horse for states to sort of increase their own powers, whether it’s surveillance powers, whether it is increased police presence and increased, you know, just like more special and extraordinary laws – I think you guys have actually talked about this extensively in your podcast as well about increased punitive measures which don’t actually work, especially criminal law isn’t criminal law legal systems, you know, empowering them. So, I think protectionism constantly plays out in whether it’s in the home, whether it’s in our educational institutions, whether at the level of the State itself. And justice to, I mean, sorry, I forgot the question you talked about protectionism in, how does it play out in the city? That was the question, right? Yeah, sorry.
So, how it plays out in the city primarily is, look at every single time we have widely reported, a very public spectacle around a particularly gruesome incident of violence, you see demands for more surveillance infrastructure and more police presence and maybe sometimes it’s like more gender representation in police, which is fair-we should have gender representation and every facet of the state. But none of these things actually help make women feel safer. What actually makes women safer is the policies such as free bus services, free public transport for women; which the Delhi government incidentally did and they drew a lot of flak where they were like, oh, but these are freebies, this is just some kind of like you’re just doing this for what? Okay, I honestly don’t care why they’re doing it, but what they actually did is one of the most feminist things you can do in the city. You make transport free for women, you are sending an indication to every family that encourages women to go out. So, earlier if they were not sending their women to their work or to, I don’t know, get groceries or whatever, where that division often starts at home, right? Like from a very young age, girls are supposed to be inside the house and boys will, you know, go out and do work. You’re reversing that. You’re allowing women to travel so that they don’t have to now pay every time whether they’re going to work or just to have fun. Like whatever it is, you’re making it so easy and justice by this fact, you’re making every avenue of public transport safer for every other woman there. So, to me that is one way in which a protectionist idea, we’ll not think of that we’ll not think about encouraging women to occupy public spaces. The other thing is with respect to, I mean, I’m sure you know everybody’s heard the really terrible ideas of having women register at police stations or you know- it’s such a blatant, such a bad faith thing because you know, if you just listen to feminist scholars and that’s the thing, right? Like, while I came ten years ago, everything that I think we’re talking about today, they’ve written about in this book and a lot of people have written about this extensively in other spaces as well, but nobody listens, and because I don’t think they want to listen, right? Like, I don’t think that’s because, you know, they’re not aware of these questions. The other thing I wanted to say in terms of protectionism is that one of the things I’ve talked about, you know, is Jane Jacobs has a very famous quote where she talks about natural surveillance, which is eyes on the street, right. Like when you say that if you have a vibrant city design, if you have a city, if you have a street, sorry, vibrant street design, if you have a street that’s occupied by a large group of people who are constantly moving, your street is automatically safer. I feel like that’s definitely apt in our context, except it’s slightly different also because what I think in India, being seen on the streets can very quickly become patriarchal surveillance because I don’t want to be seen, I don’t know, hanging out with a boy or a girl in my neighborhood because what if somebody calls my parents or they will notice me. So, what you need to have are highly diverse neighborhoods, so there is no community surveillance, which then sort of constantly locates people because, you know, that’s a big aspect for us. Protectionism, on the other hand, is only focused on protecting women and girls from specific forms of violence, not all forms of violence, because protectionism inevitably assumes that the home is a safer place when it actually is not. So, essentially you can be beaten at home, that’s all right because that’s a legitimate form of violence, because it’s structured as part of the Brahmanical heteronormative family. But that should not happen outside.
As you pointed out, the thing with respect to the othering that happens, that there are men of a particular community that are then, you know, harming our women easily plays into these kinds of really Islamophobic casteist, you know, classist narratives. In one of the episodes, I spoke to Dr Sneha Annavarapu and her research talks about how public spaces in the city, particularly cabs, right like where cab drivers are constructed as the people who will perpetrate violence or harassment against the female passengers rather than looking at violence as a much larger, you know, systemic problem. So, if, for instance, my safety hinges on the villainization of an entire class of men in the city, how is that truly safe, right? Like, that’s actually not OK, that’s actually, you know, injustice at the cost of a false sense of safety that is being perpetrated.
Ruchika
Thank you for that. Those were such good examples and points you’ve made there. Again, like, I’m learning so much with this conversation. I don’t think I’ve thought of most of these issues. I actually listened to your episode with Sneha. That was such a good episode. It’s so insightful. So, thank you for that. So, this is the final question we have for you and it’s kind of an aspirational question. It is something that has briefly come up in one of our past episodes. So, we’ve grappled with this podcast space, and I’m sure outside as well with the idea of what a Just world would look like. And for this episode, we’d specifically like to explore with you what a just public space would look like? So, could you give us three recommendations on how we can build spaces that aid in building a world free of gender-based violence or are most sensitively responsive to gender-based violence?
Sneha
In the Feminist City podcast series, I opened the first episode talking about Sultana’s dream, which is basically a short story that imagines, you know, I think feminist utopia, which I think is what a just society or a just space would also be. Basically, she talks about an ecological paradise where she says there are so many trees. And then she talks about all these women out in the street and she describes a world of scientific advancement and no police. She says “This is not a world with police, this is not a world with criminal magistrates.” So, I mean of course all the men have been confined to sananas and madanas are, you know, so that’s the part of the fantasy in ‘Sultana’s Dream’. But what she describes is a world where I think people are just people, there are no categorizations or discrimination based on, you know, where they come from. And I think when we imagine a city, it’s really important. I think when we imagine any kind of just society, I think the focus should be on the conditions that foster violence, the conditions that foster exploitation and the conditions that produce unsafety rather than, you know, looking at things from a superficial perspective. Because tomorrow, I mean this is something that we talked about in our episode on criminalization as well. How many people will you jail? Because the persistence and the pervasive nature of violence against women exists across every cross section of society. There is not a single community in this country or around the world that can actually say, oh, we actually don’t harm the girls in our communities. That doesn’t exist. So, it then to me then it becomes imagining. This would then focus on abolition of those conditions that create the situation. And as for policy recommendations, I think fundamentally there were, I mean four recommendations I made in terms of infrastructure. First of all, urban infrastructure should be designed to be completely accessible, open and free to use for everybody in the city. And the design should be made keeping in mind people who are left out of traditional imaginations of who is the user of the city. So, this necessarily involves persons with disability, and within that, particularly women and girls and old women and pregnant women. So, because the category of women also is just so complex, it’s necessary to essentially have an intersectional perspective and invest in social infrastructure. Don’t privatize what should be public spaces and public services. They should be open and accessible to everyone, because the second you privatize an essential or any public service, you automatically make it inaccessible to anyone who can’t afford it. It’s an inherently unjust system. The other thing is who is making the city? Who is making the decisions that govern urban policies and public spaces in particular, we need diversity in the rooms where these decisions are taken. Particularly, you need planners, architects and lawyers, just anybody who is involved in the city, to be experts in feminist thinking. I think the notion somehow that only people who work on issues with respective women should know these questions, No. But if you’re doing anything that affects the city, you automatically have to be an expert both on issues of gender, class, caste and you should know the history of the city that you work with. So, I think the importance of social sciences is essentially so critical in these kinds of what are seen as techno, managerial exercises or technical fields.
And thirdly, I think we need a constitutional change and we need changes in laws that reflect things like feminist urban planning and things like thinking about cities from a justice-oriented perspective. Which then requires us to strengthen community participation to a point where it’s not something that’s nominal, where you create a plan and then people will consult and then you decide whether you want to do this, listen to them or not, where they’re cocreators, right? And I think this kind of work has happened in places. I think it happens whether you have safety or dates, exploratory walks, (in) which women from a particular neighborhood are being involved in this process so that they can tell you what they need in their particular areas. Because people who live in a particular area are experts on their areas. And what would be the responsibility of city governments to do is to listen to those who are traditionally silenced from the same community. So, the gender perspective has to be critically integrated. And yeah, so I think based on that, like once you start thinking that way, the solutions sort of come by themselves because then you have to collect data, gender disaggregated data from different kinds of points.
Because now I think what happens is if you’re collecting data about men and women, but within that kind of data, you don’t look for cross sections of caste, class, religion and other kinds of identities, which is why you need a proper- so you should be able to identify different groups and make policy decisions based on that.
Vandita
No, that was incredible. Thank you so much, Sneha. I think it’s so lovely to also be able to think about these things as really tangible demands from our local governments, right. And to not just think about it only at the state or national level. I think that’s something that I really enjoy about your work as well, that it engages local civic communities.
We’re really trying to, like, push the boundaries with imagining a just world and your perspective on just public spaces and safer public spaces and accessible public spaces, especially keeping in mind how all identities intersect with gender, has really helped us think a lot more about how we move forward and where we go from here. To our listeners, if you like this episode, please follow Sneha’s podcast ‘The Feminist City’ and do follow her at @magicanarchist on Twitter (X).
Ruchika
Until next time, please stay with us on our journey as we search for justice.
| ‘Why Loiter?’ by the authors Shilpa Fatke, Samira Khan, and Shilpa Ranade Women push the boundaries in various ways, cajoling, threatening, inventing convoluted stories, and lying in a bid to increase their access to the public. Even when they do not use explicitly feminist language, these acts of rebellion do contribute to pushing women’s claims to occupy public space. At the same time, these performances also put women into neat pigeonholes which might work against their making other, more radical claims to the public. Seeking access as visibly respectable and feminine women also excludes all those women who do not wish to be feminine or respectable in their dress and demeanor. In the short term, tall tales and elaborate masquerades might allow us to seek pleasure in public space. In the long run, however, what we need are not covert strategies, but the demand for unconditional access to public space so that women may walk freely anytime and anywhere in the city. |
***
Do you have thoughts on this episode, and want to share them with us? Use the comment box to tell us what you think! Stay tuned for the next episode.
About the In Search of Justice Podcast
As we strive to collectively build towards social justice, it becomes imperative to challenge and reorient the very conceptions of justice. Justice, in popular culture and the zeitgeist overall, has been synonymised with carcerality, which presents a very myopic perspective of justice and diminishes the significance of justice as an intrinsic human right. Further, in the case of survivors of abuse, pathways to justice are further limited and often don’t include the survivors themselves in the process. Justice thus, becomes a destination, an outcome, rather than a collaborative, collectively-built journey or process. Through this compilation of the transcripts of the In Search of Justice Podcast, we aim to explore this discourse surrounding justice, particularly in the context of gender-based violence, in bite-sized episodes. Co-hosted by Vandita and Ruchika, these conversations seek to navigate the multiple meanings of justice, especially when it is considered the penultimate goal by questioning carceral systems, introducing alternative justice systems and leading the conversation into how we can build justice systems that are receptive and responsive to the various needs and desires of survivors.