Re-Thinking the “City of Fear”: A Social Reproduction Approach to the Spatialization of Women’s Fear

Abstract

This article contributes to the debate on the geographies of fear, which focuses on how gender relations are shaped in urban spaces, while becoming an integral part of neoliberal urban programs. Based on a qualitative case study conducted in a neighborhood of Bologna, Italy, this study adopts a social reproduction lens to examine women’s fear in everyday life, looking at how representations of the neighborhood affect their perceptions and how public and private spaces are held together. The main findings show how social reproduction emphasizes that racism and sexism are reproduced in an intertwined manner, and how “home-making” practices in the neighborhood contribute to the production of space, thus extending the understanding of social reproduction to urban spaces. Furthermore, the proposed approach represents an epistemological strategy to capture local specificities, being therefore able to “provincialize” urban theory, and to analyze how everyday experiences influence both urban change and urban theory.