Introduction

The volume presents compelling insight into women’s experiences, practices and resistances of and to urbanization, focussing on women’s urban lives in the global South. It centres on new modes of sustainable practice that engage women in solutions to insecure livelihoods, land and tenure in Part One, food and water access and insecurity in Part Two, and to dislocation, exclusion and violence in Part Three. The authors of this volume call for a gender-just sustainable urbanization and in doing so critically examines sustainability, including of existing practices of and forecast and imagined focuses on sustainability. Sustainable urbanization is argued to necessarily centre on food security, land and housing tenure, and realization of rights and freedoms for all while recognizing the vital gendered differences of our lives. Livelihood security is key too to this vision of practice- and policy-based sustainable urbanization, one that is at some odds with dominant global frameworks. Importantly, the focus is on sustainable lives within cities, rather than sustainable cities per se. The gendered nature of contemporary urbanization is also examined, with particular emphasis on women-identifying individuals’ and collectives’ experiences of urbanization. It is not supposed that the experiences of un/sustainable urbanization are binarized, nor that gender itself is. There is no universal woman subject at the heart of this collection of essays. The Introduction outlines the key arguments of the volume, the threads that bind the diverse case-studies and ways in which women are striving for sustainable futures in urban settings.