Drawing from empirical fieldwork in Kolkata, India, this paper demonstrates how the urban built environment and infrastructural absences along with its strategic presence as per context, leads to unequal accessibility, safety, and differentiated urban experience for women and marginalized groups in city spaces. I expose how violence operates in a continuum from private to public spaces through prejudiced social attitudes and urban infrastructure to reproduce gender and other sociospatial inequalities in cities. I refer to these exclusionary urban experiences as “violence of the urban,” which is intersectional and multinatured in forms of slow, symbolic, and planned forms of violence embedded in everyday lives and is sustained as a tactic to reify the hegemonic structural power relations in urban spaces. I argue that this broadened understanding of gendered urban violence is crucial for urban practitioners to create inclusive cities.
Ritwika Biswas (Tue,) studied this question.