Monsterized city streets: Thoughts on women’s urban experience

Studies dealing with women’s urban experiences have increased in number and varied in terms of scope especially after 1980’s. However, interestingly it still is not a popular topic in Turkey even though urban studies have been one of the hottest fields within Turkish academia. This phenomenon proves the critique of feminist authors working on urban issues that urban theories overlook gender. In addition to the efforts to understand the city as a construction from women’s perspective, another major focus of the literature on feminist urban studies is to discuss the impacts of urban planning on women’s lives. This paper aims to gather different approaches regarding these two subtopics of the field in general, addresses how anonymity and temporariness of relations of the daily practices within urban spaces affect women’s choices and lives. On the other hand, stressing the two-sided nature of the interaction between women and the city, a discussion on how women can transform the public space collectively is developed. This paper tries to analyze the factor of fear in different contexts and also refers to privatization as a gendered process by keeping the effects of globalization and changing tendencies in mind.