UPDATE: Reader John sent a counterexample: a hotel in Azerbaijan. Unfortunately, it’s invalid because it was built by Donald Trump! In fact, the Trump Tower Baku never opened. . .
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This is one of those articles so over the top that you don’t know whether it belongs in the Guardian or the Onion. Unfortunately, it’s in the former, showing that the Guardian, long circling the drain of wokeness, will publish nearly anything so long as it’s ideologically pure. In fact, this article, by Leslie Kern, is such a stylistic and argumentative mess that one isn’t sure what the point really is, except to press every hot button of the Authoritarian Left.
Click to read and weep:
The article starts out as an accusation of a phallocentric urban architecture that, says Kern, exemplifies in stone, glass, and steel the oppressive tenets of the Patriarchy. To wit:
Glass ceilings and phallic towers. Mean streets and dark alleys. Road names and statues of men. From the physical to the metaphorical, the city is filled with reminders of masculine power. And yet we rarely talk of the urban landscape as an active participant in gender inequality. A building, no matter how phallic, isn’t actually misogynist, is it? Surely a skyscraper isn’t responsible for sexual harassment, the wage gap, or even the glass ceiling, whether it has a literal one up top or not?
That said, our built environments can still reflect patterns of gender-based discrimination. To imagine the city and its structures as neutral places where complicated human social relations are staged is to ignore the simple fact that people built these places. As the feminist geographer Jane Darke has said: “Our cities are patriarchy written in stone, brick, glass and concrete.” In other words, cities reflect the norms of the societies that build them. And sexism is a deep-rooted norm.
As far back as 1977, an American poet and professor of architecture named Dolores Hayden wrote an article with the explosive headline “Skyscraper seduction, skyscraper rape”. Hayden tore into the male power fantasies embodied in this celebrated urban form. The office tower, she wrote, is one more addition “to the procession of phallic monuments in history – including poles, obelisks, spires, columns and watchtowers”, where architects un-ironically use the language of “base, shaft and tip” while drawing upward-thrusting buildings ejaculating light into the night sky.
At those point I chortled internally, but then forced myself to continue:
If the sexism of the city began and ended with architectural symbolism, I would’ve happily written a grad school essay about this then turned my attention to more pressing matters. But society’s historical and ongoing ideas about the proper gender roles for men and women (organised along a narrow binary) are built right into our cities – and they still matter. They matter to me as a mother. They matter to me as a busy professor who often finds herself in strange cities, wondering if it’s OK to pop into the neighbourhood pub alone. Ask any woman who’s tried to bring a pram on to a bus, breastfeed in a park, or go for a jog at night. She intuitively understands the message the city sends her: this place is not for you.
Here we see Argumentation from Authority: the citation of two feminist writers to prove the case that skyscrapers are simply phalluses write large. No, they don’t exist because of the limitations of urban space, but to show off the genitalia of the Oppressor. Kern adds a picture of what, to be sure, is the most penis-like building I’ve ever seen. However, she shows the building—the office of the People’s Daily newspaper in Beijing—when it was under construction. Its phallosity declined considerably when it was done.
Kern’s photo in the Guardian article (from Imaginechina/Rex Features). Under construction:
As it looks now, completed, looking more like a toboggan than a penis:
After writing those paragraphs, Kern abandons her hypothesis about architecture and simply goes off the rails, full steam ahead, reciting a boilerplate of grievances that have absolutely nothing to do with architecture. The suburbs, for example, are characterized as a way to turn working women in the city into stay-at-home moms out of town. Even the cities themselves are indicted as places that allow domestic violence, make breastfeeding difficult, and prevent women access to running (or patronizing) businesses.
Poor old Jane Addams is even dragged in as an example of what the city needs, neglecting the fact that her famous Hull House in Chicago was a center for social work, particularly in the immigrant community. It is by no means a typical city building, but the harbinger of an admirable way to do social work. Kern’s article then becomes completely unmoored from architecture:
The vast majority of violence, including fatal violence, against women and girls worldwide is perpetrated in the home, and lockdowns have exacerbated its every cause. These include stress, financial pressure, isolation, and a lack of interventions from family, friends and colleagues. Women are frightened to access shelter services and have little safe space or time to reach out for help. Not only is it almost impossible to move during the pandemic, loss of employment for many also means they can’t afford to leave anyway.
These problems weren’t created by coronavirus. The pandemic is merely exposing the fact that cities have been content to ignore domestic violence, not seeing it as an urban problem deeply connected to such issues as housing, employment, transportation, childcare, and of course the wage gap. Ultimately, tackling domestic violence may mean unsettling the heterosexual nuclear family in ways that would be deeply disruptive to the status quo – namely, disruptive to the long-standing reliance on the single-family home as a place of unpaid care work, a disruption cities can ill afford given their reluctance to fund childcare, subsidise housing and prevent violence.
The good news is that women haven’t been twiddling our thumbs waiting for city planners or politicians to solve these problems. In fact, women have been coming up with their own designs for cities and homes for well over a century. In 1889, Jane Addams founded Hull House in Chicago, a social settlement for young, unmarried women and immigrants who needed a safe home and a sense of community.
But wait! There’s more! Not content to leave any Woke trope unmentioned, Kern notes that “Black Lives Matter. . . was founded by black women” (indeed, but this is irrelevant to Kern’s thesis), and of course the cops come in for a beating too (my emphasis):
The current situation offers an unprecedented opportunity for even bigger changes. One possibility comes via the anti-racism protests sweeping the globe: defund the police. Transfer that money to affordable housing, childcare and public transport, all of which would dramatically improve women’s lives in ways that increased policing never has. A second move: all those people suddenly deemed “essential workers” should be paid as if our lives depend on them, because they do. Third: reinvest in the public realm by creating accessible, barrier-free spaces and transport systems that would allow everyone full access to the benefits of city living.
At this point I mercifully draw the curtains on the article, though you can read it if you want. It’s not that women don’t have legitimate grievances; it’s that Kern manages, in a confusing Joyceian mind-dump, to drag them all into a piece that is supposed to be how architecture mirrors the patriarchy. And she says absolutely nothing that hasn’t been said before.
h/t: Simon
