Lecture #6 | Sherilyn MacGREGOR | "Care and the city: why the time is right for ecofeminist urban visions"
Ecofeminism emerged in the early 1970s as a challenge to an ecology movement that ignored gender inequality and to a women’s movement that ignored the ecological crisis. By the 1990s the insights of ecofeminist activists were embedded in a new field of feminist urbanism that put social reproduction – the everyday work of caring for people, places and planet – at the centre of its visions. In the 2020s, a time of catastrophic interlocking social, economic and ecological crises, these visions have finally come of age. It is now widely accepted that just and sustainable cities must also be caring cities: cities where care is collectivised and accessible to all and where care for the commons is prioritised over profit and private property. In this seminar, I will trace the history and review the central themes of ecofeminist urban visions, offering examples of how they are manifested in practice and policy. In addition to examples from European cities such as Barcelona and Glasgow, I will discuss why the provision of social and built infrastructure that collectivises care work is a core pillar of a feminist green new deal.
Part of the 2022/23 StadsSalonsUrbains lecture series 'moving cities forward, leaving no one behind. toward fair & sustainable transitions'. Full programme available here.
Lectures will be streamed on this channel!
Sherilyn MacGregor is Professor of Environmental Politics, based in the Department of Politics and the Sustainable Consumption Institute at the University of Manchester, UK. She has a wide-ranging profile of research on the gender dimensions of environment, climate and sustainability issues. She brings an intersectional ecofeminist perspective to questions of environmental and climate justice, ecological citizenship, commoning social reproduction, and everyday sustainabilities.
Recent publications that would be useful to read before the seminar include: Caring in a Changing Climate (Oxfam USA, 2022); ‘Making matter great again? ecofeminism, new materialism and the everyday turn in environmental politics’ (Environmental Politics 30, 2021); A feminist green new deal for the UK (2020); ‘Beyond wishful thinking: a feminist political ecology perspective on commoning, care, and the promise of co-housing’ International Journal of the Commons 31(1), 2019) and The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment (2017).