The revolutionary act of walking in the city
A look at the Royal Academy's discussion 'Women’s Journeys in the City and Beyond' featuring Lubaina Himid
January 27, 2023
‘Doors are hard to open because men designed them. Steps too steep because men designed them. If I was designing a city from scratch, sure, it would have no men in it at all. But as women, we have to reclaim, to occupy, half the city.’
So said the Turner Prize-winner Lubaina Himid CBE RA, at Women’s Journeys in the City and Beyond, a talk organised by the Royal Academy as part of Making Modernism. The landmark exhibition points to the parallel developments in urbanisation and women’s rights in the early 1900s, and the city as a space where women could find and create opportunities. From Käthe Kollwitz to Paula Modersohn-Becker, none of the four ‘German’ painters on show trod the same path.
Women’s Journeys took a similarly plural and interdisciplinary approach to its discussion, as interested in what women have to say about things other than being a woman. Himid joined Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, and British architect Stephanie Macdonald OBE, for a nuanced discussion of women’s experiences of space. Chair Ella Whelan chalked in her own interest in literary modernism, and more contemporary, complex questions about street lighting, personal safety, and Sarah Everard.
Drawing from her local community, Stephanie Macdonald highlighted how women have blurred the boundary - perhaps the binary – between public and private spaces, creating the ‘connective tissue’ that makes cities work. She also advocates for ‘imperfect’ architectural design, respecting the dust and debris of the past that lingers in a place and gives people a sense of continuity, something that’s even more important in the wake of COVID.
Himid took examples from her touring exhibition Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City. Phyllis Pearsall, for example, walked the streets from 5am every morning to chart the first Geographers’ A-Z. Now contemporary artist Cornelia Parker obliterates landmarks on those very same maps of London.
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Found Cities, Lost Objects is populated by the Arts Council Collection, a collection built to ‘lend not borrow’, with artists like Ingrid Pollard offering regional representations. Himid’s favourite journey is the walk over Waterloo Bridge; with respect to her own experiences of living in and leaving London, she admits her own prejudice against the rural.
More peripatetic is Lauren Elkin, who illustrated her relocation from Paris to London through a potted history of the visual arts. In France, women were deemed troublemakers and disruptors for their role at the forefront of the French Revolution (1789), a misogyny that persisted to prejudice women in the Paris Commune a century later, and arguably, still today. We infer that ‘modern’ media have often served as outlets for existing power structures, and thoroughly outdated ideas.
Elkin drove the discussion, drawing as much from Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces (1974) as Laura Grace/Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah (2011). The latter sees London as ‘not only the backdrop but the fabric of encounters’, and Ford herself features photographed holding a beer, or perhaps a Molotov cocktail.
Standing still in one’s place is a defiant assertion of power. Elsewhere, Himid has spoken of how women often struggle to wander aimlessly, as they are socialised to be productive, to be going somewhere. (Perhaps that is why she finds it easier to be alone in urban rather than rural environments.) For young girls, this expectation confines them to playing at home or in shopping centres – schools of consumerism - and less in parks and playgrounds.
Elkin highlighted London King’s Cross as a place where ‘powerful people with more money than us have created playgrounds for us to be yuppies and raise yuppie children’. Indeed, much of the discussion focussed on London – Hackney, Haringey, and Clapham Common. Areas undergoing gentrification, which designs to disconnect people from their surroundings.
Macdonald rightfully stressed the effects of climate change and capitalism on the built environment. Drawing on Kate Raworth’s economics, she highlighted how our surroundings are constructed by economics, and encouraged those who live within them to live in an economically-motivated fashion – but that can change. Like Himid, she was a joking proponent of making public transport free for all women.
But the Benjamin West Lecture Theatre echoed the discussion’s academic, architectural tone. Neither recorded, nor accessible to those outside of London, there’s an assumption of this capital as a standard template for city living. But how would the conversation change with women’s lived experiences in Manchester? In Kreuzberg, Berlin, where all streets and public places are to be named after women until parity is reached with men? Or for women who seek solidarity in ‘online cities’?
Women’s Journeys made no gender generalisations, nor claims to anything biological or essential about womanhood. But it did underscore how these problems - and their solutions - should not be simply women’s responsibility. The few men, mainly husbands, of the audience indicates the long journey to gender parity that lies ahead.
Walking helps me to understand places, so I started the podcast historicity, a series of audio walking tours that explore how cities got to be the way they are. Himid is right that women often did not physically build cities. But some did, and many more wove the social infrastructures that still shape our experience of cities now. The single women of Grosvenor Square who used the West End to cement their social status and political influence. The Bedford Estate that birthed the British Museum. The eighteenth-century businesswoman Eleanor Coade, whose stone still holds up many buildings in Bloomsbury today.
We must be aware of the difference between observation and participation, something highlighted in Van Gogh House London’s recent exhibition on the Brixton-based community activist Olive Morris. Indeed, we shouldn’t seek to ‘occupy’ the city nor ‘do it like men’, as Himid suggested. Rather, we should seek to do it better, not to own but share spaces with each other.
Women’s Journeys in the City and Beyond is part of Making Modernism at the Royal Academy, on show until 12 February 2023. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘Doors are hard to open because men designed them. Steps too steep because men designed them. If I was designing a city from scratch, sure, it would have no men in it at all. But as women, we have to reclaim, to occupy, half the city.’
So said the Turner Prize-winner Lubaina Himid CBE RA, at Women’s Journeys in the City and Beyond, a talk organised by the Royal Academy as part of Making Modernism. The landmark exhibition points to the parallel developments in urbanisation and women’s rights in the early 1900s, and the city as a space where women could find and create opportunities. From Käthe Kollwitz to Paula Modersohn-Becker, none of the four ‘German’ painters on show trod the same path.
Women’s Journeys took a similarly plural and interdisciplinary approach to its discussion, as interested in what women have to say about things other than being a woman. Himid joined Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, and British architect Stephanie Macdonald OBE, for a nuanced discussion of women’s experiences of space. Chair Ella Whelan chalked in her own interest in literary modernism, and more contemporary, complex questions about street lighting, personal safety, and Sarah Everard.
Drawing from her local community, Stephanie Macdonald highlighted how women have blurred the boundary - perhaps the binary – between public and private spaces, creating the ‘connective tissue’ that makes cities work. She also advocates for ‘imperfect’ architectural design, respecting the dust and debris of the past that lingers in a place and gives people a sense of continuity, something that’s even more important in the wake of COVID.
Himid took examples from her touring exhibition Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City. Phyllis Pearsall, for example, walked the streets from 5am every morning to chart the first Geographers’ A-Z. Now contemporary artist Cornelia Parker obliterates landmarks on those very same maps of London.
Found Cities, Lost Objects is populated by the Arts Council Collection, a collection built to ‘lend not borrow’, with artists like Ingrid Pollard offering regional representations. Himid’s favourite journey is the walk over Waterloo Bridge; with respect to her own experiences of living in and leaving London, she admits her own prejudice against the rural.
More peripatetic is Lauren Elkin, who illustrated her relocation from Paris to London through a potted history of the visual arts. In France, women were deemed troublemakers and disruptors for their role at the forefront of the French Revolution (1789), a misogyny that persisted to prejudice women in the Paris Commune a century later, and arguably, still today. We infer that ‘modern’ media have often served as outlets for existing power structures, and thoroughly outdated ideas.
Elkin drove the discussion, drawing as much from Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces (1974) as Laura Grace/Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah (2011). The latter sees London as ‘not only the backdrop but the fabric of encounters’, and Ford herself features photographed holding a beer, or perhaps a Molotov cocktail.
Standing still in one’s place is a defiant assertion of power. Elsewhere, Himid has spoken of how women often struggle to wander aimlessly, as they are socialised to be productive, to be going somewhere. (Perhaps that is why she finds it easier to be alone in urban rather than rural environments.) For young girls, this expectation confines them to playing at home or in shopping centres – schools of consumerism - and less in parks and playgrounds.
Elkin highlighted London King’s Cross as a place where ‘powerful people with more money than us have created playgrounds for us to be yuppies and raise yuppie children’. Indeed, much of the discussion focussed on London – Hackney, Haringey, and Clapham Common. Areas undergoing gentrification, which designs to disconnect people from their surroundings.
Macdonald rightfully stressed the effects of climate change and capitalism on the built environment. Drawing on Kate Raworth’s economics, she highlighted how our surroundings are constructed by economics, and encouraged those who live within them to live in an economically-motivated fashion – but that can change. Like Himid, she was a joking proponent of making public transport free for all women.
But the Benjamin West Lecture Theatre echoed the discussion’s academic, architectural tone. Neither recorded, nor accessible to those outside of London, there’s an assumption of this capital as a standard template for city living. But how would the conversation change with women’s lived experiences in Manchester? In Kreuzberg, Berlin, where all streets and public places are to be named after women until parity is reached with men? Or for women who seek solidarity in ‘online cities’?
Women’s Journeys made no gender generalisations, nor claims to anything biological or essential about womanhood. But it did underscore how these problems - and their solutions - should not be simply women’s responsibility. The few men, mainly husbands, of the audience indicates the long journey to gender parity that lies ahead.
Walking helps me to understand places, so I started the podcast historicity, a series of audio walking tours that explore how cities got to be the way they are. Himid is right that women often did not physically build cities. But some did, and many more wove the social infrastructures that still shape our experience of cities now. The single women of Grosvenor Square who used the West End to cement their social status and political influence. The Bedford Estate that birthed the British Museum. The eighteenth-century businesswoman Eleanor Coade, whose stone still holds up many buildings in Bloomsbury today.
We must be aware of the difference between observation and participation, something highlighted in Van Gogh House London’s recent exhibition on the Brixton-based community activist Olive Morris. Indeed, we shouldn’t seek to ‘occupy’ the city nor ‘do it like men’, as Himid suggested. Rather, we should seek to do it better, not to own but share spaces with each other.
Women’s Journeys in the City and Beyond is part of Making Modernism at the Royal Academy, on show until 12 February 2023. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘Doors are hard to open because men designed them. Steps too steep because men designed them. If I was designing a city from scratch, sure, it would have no men in it at all. But as women, we have to reclaim, to occupy, half the city.’
So said the Turner Prize-winner Lubaina Himid CBE RA, at Women’s Journeys in the City and Beyond, a talk organised by the Royal Academy as part of Making Modernism. The landmark exhibition points to the parallel developments in urbanisation and women’s rights in the early 1900s, and the city as a space where women could find and create opportunities. From Käthe Kollwitz to Paula Modersohn-Becker, none of the four ‘German’ painters on show trod the same path.
Women’s Journeys took a similarly plural and interdisciplinary approach to its discussion, as interested in what women have to say about things other than being a woman. Himid joined Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, and British architect Stephanie Macdonald OBE, for a nuanced discussion of women’s experiences of space. Chair Ella Whelan chalked in her own interest in literary modernism, and more contemporary, complex questions about street lighting, personal safety, and Sarah Everard.
Drawing from her local community, Stephanie Macdonald highlighted how women have blurred the boundary - perhaps the binary – between public and private spaces, creating the ‘connective tissue’ that makes cities work. She also advocates for ‘imperfect’ architectural design, respecting the dust and debris of the past that lingers in a place and gives people a sense of continuity, something that’s even more important in the wake of COVID.
Himid took examples from her touring exhibition Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City. Phyllis Pearsall, for example, walked the streets from 5am every morning to chart the first Geographers’ A-Z. Now contemporary artist Cornelia Parker obliterates landmarks on those very same maps of London.
Found Cities, Lost Objects is populated by the Arts Council Collection, a collection built to ‘lend not borrow’, with artists like Ingrid Pollard offering regional representations. Himid’s favourite journey is the walk over Waterloo Bridge; with respect to her own experiences of living in and leaving London, she admits her own prejudice against the rural.
More peripatetic is Lauren Elkin, who illustrated her relocation from Paris to London through a potted history of the visual arts. In France, women were deemed troublemakers and disruptors for their role at the forefront of the French Revolution (1789), a misogyny that persisted to prejudice women in the Paris Commune a century later, and arguably, still today. We infer that ‘modern’ media have often served as outlets for existing power structures, and thoroughly outdated ideas.
Elkin drove the discussion, drawing as much from Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces (1974) as Laura Grace/Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah (2011). The latter sees London as ‘not only the backdrop but the fabric of encounters’, and Ford herself features photographed holding a beer, or perhaps a Molotov cocktail.
Standing still in one’s place is a defiant assertion of power. Elsewhere, Himid has spoken of how women often struggle to wander aimlessly, as they are socialised to be productive, to be going somewhere. (Perhaps that is why she finds it easier to be alone in urban rather than rural environments.) For young girls, this expectation confines them to playing at home or in shopping centres – schools of consumerism - and less in parks and playgrounds.
Elkin highlighted London King’s Cross as a place where ‘powerful people with more money than us have created playgrounds for us to be yuppies and raise yuppie children’. Indeed, much of the discussion focussed on London – Hackney, Haringey, and Clapham Common. Areas undergoing gentrification, which designs to disconnect people from their surroundings.
Macdonald rightfully stressed the effects of climate change and capitalism on the built environment. Drawing on Kate Raworth’s economics, she highlighted how our surroundings are constructed by economics, and encouraged those who live within them to live in an economically-motivated fashion – but that can change. Like Himid, she was a joking proponent of making public transport free for all women.
But the Benjamin West Lecture Theatre echoed the discussion’s academic, architectural tone. Neither recorded, nor accessible to those outside of London, there’s an assumption of this capital as a standard template for city living. But how would the conversation change with women’s lived experiences in Manchester? In Kreuzberg, Berlin, where all streets and public places are to be named after women until parity is reached with men? Or for women who seek solidarity in ‘online cities’?
Women’s Journeys made no gender generalisations, nor claims to anything biological or essential about womanhood. But it did underscore how these problems - and their solutions - should not be simply women’s responsibility. The few men, mainly husbands, of the audience indicates the long journey to gender parity that lies ahead.
Walking helps me to understand places, so I started the podcast historicity, a series of audio walking tours that explore how cities got to be the way they are. Himid is right that women often did not physically build cities. But some did, and many more wove the social infrastructures that still shape our experience of cities now. The single women of Grosvenor Square who used the West End to cement their social status and political influence. The Bedford Estate that birthed the British Museum. The eighteenth-century businesswoman Eleanor Coade, whose stone still holds up many buildings in Bloomsbury today.
We must be aware of the difference between observation and participation, something highlighted in Van Gogh House London’s recent exhibition on the Brixton-based community activist Olive Morris. Indeed, we shouldn’t seek to ‘occupy’ the city nor ‘do it like men’, as Himid suggested. Rather, we should seek to do it better, not to own but share spaces with each other.
Women’s Journeys in the City and Beyond is part of Making Modernism at the Royal Academy, on show until 12 February 2023. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘Doors are hard to open because men designed them. Steps too steep because men designed them. If I was designing a city from scratch, sure, it would have no men in it at all. But as women, we have to reclaim, to occupy, half the city.’
So said the Turner Prize-winner Lubaina Himid CBE RA, at Women’s Journeys in the City and Beyond, a talk organised by the Royal Academy as part of Making Modernism. The landmark exhibition points to the parallel developments in urbanisation and women’s rights in the early 1900s, and the city as a space where women could find and create opportunities. From Käthe Kollwitz to Paula Modersohn-Becker, none of the four ‘German’ painters on show trod the same path.
Women’s Journeys took a similarly plural and interdisciplinary approach to its discussion, as interested in what women have to say about things other than being a woman. Himid joined Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, and British architect Stephanie Macdonald OBE, for a nuanced discussion of women’s experiences of space. Chair Ella Whelan chalked in her own interest in literary modernism, and more contemporary, complex questions about street lighting, personal safety, and Sarah Everard.
Drawing from her local community, Stephanie Macdonald highlighted how women have blurred the boundary - perhaps the binary – between public and private spaces, creating the ‘connective tissue’ that makes cities work. She also advocates for ‘imperfect’ architectural design, respecting the dust and debris of the past that lingers in a place and gives people a sense of continuity, something that’s even more important in the wake of COVID.
Himid took examples from her touring exhibition Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City. Phyllis Pearsall, for example, walked the streets from 5am every morning to chart the first Geographers’ A-Z. Now contemporary artist Cornelia Parker obliterates landmarks on those very same maps of London.
Found Cities, Lost Objects is populated by the Arts Council Collection, a collection built to ‘lend not borrow’, with artists like Ingrid Pollard offering regional representations. Himid’s favourite journey is the walk over Waterloo Bridge; with respect to her own experiences of living in and leaving London, she admits her own prejudice against the rural.
More peripatetic is Lauren Elkin, who illustrated her relocation from Paris to London through a potted history of the visual arts. In France, women were deemed troublemakers and disruptors for their role at the forefront of the French Revolution (1789), a misogyny that persisted to prejudice women in the Paris Commune a century later, and arguably, still today. We infer that ‘modern’ media have often served as outlets for existing power structures, and thoroughly outdated ideas.
Elkin drove the discussion, drawing as much from Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces (1974) as Laura Grace/Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah (2011). The latter sees London as ‘not only the backdrop but the fabric of encounters’, and Ford herself features photographed holding a beer, or perhaps a Molotov cocktail.
Standing still in one’s place is a defiant assertion of power. Elsewhere, Himid has spoken of how women often struggle to wander aimlessly, as they are socialised to be productive, to be going somewhere. (Perhaps that is why she finds it easier to be alone in urban rather than rural environments.) For young girls, this expectation confines them to playing at home or in shopping centres – schools of consumerism - and less in parks and playgrounds.
Elkin highlighted London King’s Cross as a place where ‘powerful people with more money than us have created playgrounds for us to be yuppies and raise yuppie children’. Indeed, much of the discussion focussed on London – Hackney, Haringey, and Clapham Common. Areas undergoing gentrification, which designs to disconnect people from their surroundings.
Macdonald rightfully stressed the effects of climate change and capitalism on the built environment. Drawing on Kate Raworth’s economics, she highlighted how our surroundings are constructed by economics, and encouraged those who live within them to live in an economically-motivated fashion – but that can change. Like Himid, she was a joking proponent of making public transport free for all women.
But the Benjamin West Lecture Theatre echoed the discussion’s academic, architectural tone. Neither recorded, nor accessible to those outside of London, there’s an assumption of this capital as a standard template for city living. But how would the conversation change with women’s lived experiences in Manchester? In Kreuzberg, Berlin, where all streets and public places are to be named after women until parity is reached with men? Or for women who seek solidarity in ‘online cities’?
Women’s Journeys made no gender generalisations, nor claims to anything biological or essential about womanhood. But it did underscore how these problems - and their solutions - should not be simply women’s responsibility. The few men, mainly husbands, of the audience indicates the long journey to gender parity that lies ahead.
Walking helps me to understand places, so I started the podcast historicity, a series of audio walking tours that explore how cities got to be the way they are. Himid is right that women often did not physically build cities. But some did, and many more wove the social infrastructures that still shape our experience of cities now. The single women of Grosvenor Square who used the West End to cement their social status and political influence. The Bedford Estate that birthed the British Museum. The eighteenth-century businesswoman Eleanor Coade, whose stone still holds up many buildings in Bloomsbury today.
We must be aware of the difference between observation and participation, something highlighted in Van Gogh House London’s recent exhibition on the Brixton-based community activist Olive Morris. Indeed, we shouldn’t seek to ‘occupy’ the city nor ‘do it like men’, as Himid suggested. Rather, we should seek to do it better, not to own but share spaces with each other.
Women’s Journeys in the City and Beyond is part of Making Modernism at the Royal Academy, on show until 12 February 2023. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘Doors are hard to open because men designed them. Steps too steep because men designed them. If I was designing a city from scratch, sure, it would have no men in it at all. But as women, we have to reclaim, to occupy, half the city.’
So said the Turner Prize-winner Lubaina Himid CBE RA, at Women’s Journeys in the City and Beyond, a talk organised by the Royal Academy as part of Making Modernism. The landmark exhibition points to the parallel developments in urbanisation and women’s rights in the early 1900s, and the city as a space where women could find and create opportunities. From Käthe Kollwitz to Paula Modersohn-Becker, none of the four ‘German’ painters on show trod the same path.
Women’s Journeys took a similarly plural and interdisciplinary approach to its discussion, as interested in what women have to say about things other than being a woman. Himid joined Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, and British architect Stephanie Macdonald OBE, for a nuanced discussion of women’s experiences of space. Chair Ella Whelan chalked in her own interest in literary modernism, and more contemporary, complex questions about street lighting, personal safety, and Sarah Everard.
Drawing from her local community, Stephanie Macdonald highlighted how women have blurred the boundary - perhaps the binary – between public and private spaces, creating the ‘connective tissue’ that makes cities work. She also advocates for ‘imperfect’ architectural design, respecting the dust and debris of the past that lingers in a place and gives people a sense of continuity, something that’s even more important in the wake of COVID.
Himid took examples from her touring exhibition Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City. Phyllis Pearsall, for example, walked the streets from 5am every morning to chart the first Geographers’ A-Z. Now contemporary artist Cornelia Parker obliterates landmarks on those very same maps of London.
Found Cities, Lost Objects is populated by the Arts Council Collection, a collection built to ‘lend not borrow’, with artists like Ingrid Pollard offering regional representations. Himid’s favourite journey is the walk over Waterloo Bridge; with respect to her own experiences of living in and leaving London, she admits her own prejudice against the rural.
More peripatetic is Lauren Elkin, who illustrated her relocation from Paris to London through a potted history of the visual arts. In France, women were deemed troublemakers and disruptors for their role at the forefront of the French Revolution (1789), a misogyny that persisted to prejudice women in the Paris Commune a century later, and arguably, still today. We infer that ‘modern’ media have often served as outlets for existing power structures, and thoroughly outdated ideas.
Elkin drove the discussion, drawing as much from Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces (1974) as Laura Grace/Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah (2011). The latter sees London as ‘not only the backdrop but the fabric of encounters’, and Ford herself features photographed holding a beer, or perhaps a Molotov cocktail.
Standing still in one’s place is a defiant assertion of power. Elsewhere, Himid has spoken of how women often struggle to wander aimlessly, as they are socialised to be productive, to be going somewhere. (Perhaps that is why she finds it easier to be alone in urban rather than rural environments.) For young girls, this expectation confines them to playing at home or in shopping centres – schools of consumerism - and less in parks and playgrounds.
Elkin highlighted London King’s Cross as a place where ‘powerful people with more money than us have created playgrounds for us to be yuppies and raise yuppie children’. Indeed, much of the discussion focussed on London – Hackney, Haringey, and Clapham Common. Areas undergoing gentrification, which designs to disconnect people from their surroundings.
Macdonald rightfully stressed the effects of climate change and capitalism on the built environment. Drawing on Kate Raworth’s economics, she highlighted how our surroundings are constructed by economics, and encouraged those who live within them to live in an economically-motivated fashion – but that can change. Like Himid, she was a joking proponent of making public transport free for all women.
But the Benjamin West Lecture Theatre echoed the discussion’s academic, architectural tone. Neither recorded, nor accessible to those outside of London, there’s an assumption of this capital as a standard template for city living. But how would the conversation change with women’s lived experiences in Manchester? In Kreuzberg, Berlin, where all streets and public places are to be named after women until parity is reached with men? Or for women who seek solidarity in ‘online cities’?
Women’s Journeys made no gender generalisations, nor claims to anything biological or essential about womanhood. But it did underscore how these problems - and their solutions - should not be simply women’s responsibility. The few men, mainly husbands, of the audience indicates the long journey to gender parity that lies ahead.
Walking helps me to understand places, so I started the podcast historicity, a series of audio walking tours that explore how cities got to be the way they are. Himid is right that women often did not physically build cities. But some did, and many more wove the social infrastructures that still shape our experience of cities now. The single women of Grosvenor Square who used the West End to cement their social status and political influence. The Bedford Estate that birthed the British Museum. The eighteenth-century businesswoman Eleanor Coade, whose stone still holds up many buildings in Bloomsbury today.
We must be aware of the difference between observation and participation, something highlighted in Van Gogh House London’s recent exhibition on the Brixton-based community activist Olive Morris. Indeed, we shouldn’t seek to ‘occupy’ the city nor ‘do it like men’, as Himid suggested. Rather, we should seek to do it better, not to own but share spaces with each other.
Women’s Journeys in the City and Beyond is part of Making Modernism at the Royal Academy, on show until 12 February 2023. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘Doors are hard to open because men designed them. Steps too steep because men designed them. If I was designing a city from scratch, sure, it would have no men in it at all. But as women, we have to reclaim, to occupy, half the city.’
So said the Turner Prize-winner Lubaina Himid CBE RA, at Women’s Journeys in the City and Beyond, a talk organised by the Royal Academy as part of Making Modernism. The landmark exhibition points to the parallel developments in urbanisation and women’s rights in the early 1900s, and the city as a space where women could find and create opportunities. From Käthe Kollwitz to Paula Modersohn-Becker, none of the four ‘German’ painters on show trod the same path.
Women’s Journeys took a similarly plural and interdisciplinary approach to its discussion, as interested in what women have to say about things other than being a woman. Himid joined Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, and British architect Stephanie Macdonald OBE, for a nuanced discussion of women’s experiences of space. Chair Ella Whelan chalked in her own interest in literary modernism, and more contemporary, complex questions about street lighting, personal safety, and Sarah Everard.
Drawing from her local community, Stephanie Macdonald highlighted how women have blurred the boundary - perhaps the binary – between public and private spaces, creating the ‘connective tissue’ that makes cities work. She also advocates for ‘imperfect’ architectural design, respecting the dust and debris of the past that lingers in a place and gives people a sense of continuity, something that’s even more important in the wake of COVID.
Himid took examples from her touring exhibition Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City. Phyllis Pearsall, for example, walked the streets from 5am every morning to chart the first Geographers’ A-Z. Now contemporary artist Cornelia Parker obliterates landmarks on those very same maps of London.
Found Cities, Lost Objects is populated by the Arts Council Collection, a collection built to ‘lend not borrow’, with artists like Ingrid Pollard offering regional representations. Himid’s favourite journey is the walk over Waterloo Bridge; with respect to her own experiences of living in and leaving London, she admits her own prejudice against the rural.
More peripatetic is Lauren Elkin, who illustrated her relocation from Paris to London through a potted history of the visual arts. In France, women were deemed troublemakers and disruptors for their role at the forefront of the French Revolution (1789), a misogyny that persisted to prejudice women in the Paris Commune a century later, and arguably, still today. We infer that ‘modern’ media have often served as outlets for existing power structures, and thoroughly outdated ideas.
Elkin drove the discussion, drawing as much from Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces (1974) as Laura Grace/Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah (2011). The latter sees London as ‘not only the backdrop but the fabric of encounters’, and Ford herself features photographed holding a beer, or perhaps a Molotov cocktail.
Standing still in one’s place is a defiant assertion of power. Elsewhere, Himid has spoken of how women often struggle to wander aimlessly, as they are socialised to be productive, to be going somewhere. (Perhaps that is why she finds it easier to be alone in urban rather than rural environments.) For young girls, this expectation confines them to playing at home or in shopping centres – schools of consumerism - and less in parks and playgrounds.
Elkin highlighted London King’s Cross as a place where ‘powerful people with more money than us have created playgrounds for us to be yuppies and raise yuppie children’. Indeed, much of the discussion focussed on London – Hackney, Haringey, and Clapham Common. Areas undergoing gentrification, which designs to disconnect people from their surroundings.
Macdonald rightfully stressed the effects of climate change and capitalism on the built environment. Drawing on Kate Raworth’s economics, she highlighted how our surroundings are constructed by economics, and encouraged those who live within them to live in an economically-motivated fashion – but that can change. Like Himid, she was a joking proponent of making public transport free for all women.
But the Benjamin West Lecture Theatre echoed the discussion’s academic, architectural tone. Neither recorded, nor accessible to those outside of London, there’s an assumption of this capital as a standard template for city living. But how would the conversation change with women’s lived experiences in Manchester? In Kreuzberg, Berlin, where all streets and public places are to be named after women until parity is reached with men? Or for women who seek solidarity in ‘online cities’?
Women’s Journeys made no gender generalisations, nor claims to anything biological or essential about womanhood. But it did underscore how these problems - and their solutions - should not be simply women’s responsibility. The few men, mainly husbands, of the audience indicates the long journey to gender parity that lies ahead.
Walking helps me to understand places, so I started the podcast historicity, a series of audio walking tours that explore how cities got to be the way they are. Himid is right that women often did not physically build cities. But some did, and many more wove the social infrastructures that still shape our experience of cities now. The single women of Grosvenor Square who used the West End to cement their social status and political influence. The Bedford Estate that birthed the British Museum. The eighteenth-century businesswoman Eleanor Coade, whose stone still holds up many buildings in Bloomsbury today.
We must be aware of the difference between observation and participation, something highlighted in Van Gogh House London’s recent exhibition on the Brixton-based community activist Olive Morris. Indeed, we shouldn’t seek to ‘occupy’ the city nor ‘do it like men’, as Himid suggested. Rather, we should seek to do it better, not to own but share spaces with each other.
Women’s Journeys in the City and Beyond is part of Making Modernism at the Royal Academy, on show until 12 February 2023. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘Doors are hard to open because men designed them. Steps too steep because men designed them. If I was designing a city from scratch, sure, it would have no men in it at all. But as women, we have to reclaim, to occupy, half the city.’
So said the Turner Prize-winner Lubaina Himid CBE RA, at Women’s Journeys in the City and Beyond, a talk organised by the Royal Academy as part of Making Modernism. The landmark exhibition points to the parallel developments in urbanisation and women’s rights in the early 1900s, and the city as a space where women could find and create opportunities. From Käthe Kollwitz to Paula Modersohn-Becker, none of the four ‘German’ painters on show trod the same path.
Women’s Journeys took a similarly plural and interdisciplinary approach to its discussion, as interested in what women have to say about things other than being a woman. Himid joined Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, and British architect Stephanie Macdonald OBE, for a nuanced discussion of women’s experiences of space. Chair Ella Whelan chalked in her own interest in literary modernism, and more contemporary, complex questions about street lighting, personal safety, and Sarah Everard.
Drawing from her local community, Stephanie Macdonald highlighted how women have blurred the boundary - perhaps the binary – between public and private spaces, creating the ‘connective tissue’ that makes cities work. She also advocates for ‘imperfect’ architectural design, respecting the dust and debris of the past that lingers in a place and gives people a sense of continuity, something that’s even more important in the wake of COVID.
Himid took examples from her touring exhibition Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City. Phyllis Pearsall, for example, walked the streets from 5am every morning to chart the first Geographers’ A-Z. Now contemporary artist Cornelia Parker obliterates landmarks on those very same maps of London.
Found Cities, Lost Objects is populated by the Arts Council Collection, a collection built to ‘lend not borrow’, with artists like Ingrid Pollard offering regional representations. Himid’s favourite journey is the walk over Waterloo Bridge; with respect to her own experiences of living in and leaving London, she admits her own prejudice against the rural.
More peripatetic is Lauren Elkin, who illustrated her relocation from Paris to London through a potted history of the visual arts. In France, women were deemed troublemakers and disruptors for their role at the forefront of the French Revolution (1789), a misogyny that persisted to prejudice women in the Paris Commune a century later, and arguably, still today. We infer that ‘modern’ media have often served as outlets for existing power structures, and thoroughly outdated ideas.
Elkin drove the discussion, drawing as much from Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces (1974) as Laura Grace/Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah (2011). The latter sees London as ‘not only the backdrop but the fabric of encounters’, and Ford herself features photographed holding a beer, or perhaps a Molotov cocktail.
Standing still in one’s place is a defiant assertion of power. Elsewhere, Himid has spoken of how women often struggle to wander aimlessly, as they are socialised to be productive, to be going somewhere. (Perhaps that is why she finds it easier to be alone in urban rather than rural environments.) For young girls, this expectation confines them to playing at home or in shopping centres – schools of consumerism - and less in parks and playgrounds.
Elkin highlighted London King’s Cross as a place where ‘powerful people with more money than us have created playgrounds for us to be yuppies and raise yuppie children’. Indeed, much of the discussion focussed on London – Hackney, Haringey, and Clapham Common. Areas undergoing gentrification, which designs to disconnect people from their surroundings.
Macdonald rightfully stressed the effects of climate change and capitalism on the built environment. Drawing on Kate Raworth’s economics, she highlighted how our surroundings are constructed by economics, and encouraged those who live within them to live in an economically-motivated fashion – but that can change. Like Himid, she was a joking proponent of making public transport free for all women.
But the Benjamin West Lecture Theatre echoed the discussion’s academic, architectural tone. Neither recorded, nor accessible to those outside of London, there’s an assumption of this capital as a standard template for city living. But how would the conversation change with women’s lived experiences in Manchester? In Kreuzberg, Berlin, where all streets and public places are to be named after women until parity is reached with men? Or for women who seek solidarity in ‘online cities’?
Women’s Journeys made no gender generalisations, nor claims to anything biological or essential about womanhood. But it did underscore how these problems - and their solutions - should not be simply women’s responsibility. The few men, mainly husbands, of the audience indicates the long journey to gender parity that lies ahead.
Walking helps me to understand places, so I started the podcast historicity, a series of audio walking tours that explore how cities got to be the way they are. Himid is right that women often did not physically build cities. But some did, and many more wove the social infrastructures that still shape our experience of cities now. The single women of Grosvenor Square who used the West End to cement their social status and political influence. The Bedford Estate that birthed the British Museum. The eighteenth-century businesswoman Eleanor Coade, whose stone still holds up many buildings in Bloomsbury today.
We must be aware of the difference between observation and participation, something highlighted in Van Gogh House London’s recent exhibition on the Brixton-based community activist Olive Morris. Indeed, we shouldn’t seek to ‘occupy’ the city nor ‘do it like men’, as Himid suggested. Rather, we should seek to do it better, not to own but share spaces with each other.
Women’s Journeys in the City and Beyond is part of Making Modernism at the Royal Academy, on show until 12 February 2023. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘Doors are hard to open because men designed them. Steps too steep because men designed them. If I was designing a city from scratch, sure, it would have no men in it at all. But as women, we have to reclaim, to occupy, half the city.’
So said the Turner Prize-winner Lubaina Himid CBE RA, at Women’s Journeys in the City and Beyond, a talk organised by the Royal Academy as part of Making Modernism. The landmark exhibition points to the parallel developments in urbanisation and women’s rights in the early 1900s, and the city as a space where women could find and create opportunities. From Käthe Kollwitz to Paula Modersohn-Becker, none of the four ‘German’ painters on show trod the same path.
Women’s Journeys took a similarly plural and interdisciplinary approach to its discussion, as interested in what women have to say about things other than being a woman. Himid joined Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, and British architect Stephanie Macdonald OBE, for a nuanced discussion of women’s experiences of space. Chair Ella Whelan chalked in her own interest in literary modernism, and more contemporary, complex questions about street lighting, personal safety, and Sarah Everard.
Drawing from her local community, Stephanie Macdonald highlighted how women have blurred the boundary - perhaps the binary – between public and private spaces, creating the ‘connective tissue’ that makes cities work. She also advocates for ‘imperfect’ architectural design, respecting the dust and debris of the past that lingers in a place and gives people a sense of continuity, something that’s even more important in the wake of COVID.
Himid took examples from her touring exhibition Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City. Phyllis Pearsall, for example, walked the streets from 5am every morning to chart the first Geographers’ A-Z. Now contemporary artist Cornelia Parker obliterates landmarks on those very same maps of London.
Found Cities, Lost Objects is populated by the Arts Council Collection, a collection built to ‘lend not borrow’, with artists like Ingrid Pollard offering regional representations. Himid’s favourite journey is the walk over Waterloo Bridge; with respect to her own experiences of living in and leaving London, she admits her own prejudice against the rural.
More peripatetic is Lauren Elkin, who illustrated her relocation from Paris to London through a potted history of the visual arts. In France, women were deemed troublemakers and disruptors for their role at the forefront of the French Revolution (1789), a misogyny that persisted to prejudice women in the Paris Commune a century later, and arguably, still today. We infer that ‘modern’ media have often served as outlets for existing power structures, and thoroughly outdated ideas.
Elkin drove the discussion, drawing as much from Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces (1974) as Laura Grace/Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah (2011). The latter sees London as ‘not only the backdrop but the fabric of encounters’, and Ford herself features photographed holding a beer, or perhaps a Molotov cocktail.
Standing still in one’s place is a defiant assertion of power. Elsewhere, Himid has spoken of how women often struggle to wander aimlessly, as they are socialised to be productive, to be going somewhere. (Perhaps that is why she finds it easier to be alone in urban rather than rural environments.) For young girls, this expectation confines them to playing at home or in shopping centres – schools of consumerism - and less in parks and playgrounds.
Elkin highlighted London King’s Cross as a place where ‘powerful people with more money than us have created playgrounds for us to be yuppies and raise yuppie children’. Indeed, much of the discussion focussed on London – Hackney, Haringey, and Clapham Common. Areas undergoing gentrification, which designs to disconnect people from their surroundings.
Macdonald rightfully stressed the effects of climate change and capitalism on the built environment. Drawing on Kate Raworth’s economics, she highlighted how our surroundings are constructed by economics, and encouraged those who live within them to live in an economically-motivated fashion – but that can change. Like Himid, she was a joking proponent of making public transport free for all women.
But the Benjamin West Lecture Theatre echoed the discussion’s academic, architectural tone. Neither recorded, nor accessible to those outside of London, there’s an assumption of this capital as a standard template for city living. But how would the conversation change with women’s lived experiences in Manchester? In Kreuzberg, Berlin, where all streets and public places are to be named after women until parity is reached with men? Or for women who seek solidarity in ‘online cities’?
Women’s Journeys made no gender generalisations, nor claims to anything biological or essential about womanhood. But it did underscore how these problems - and their solutions - should not be simply women’s responsibility. The few men, mainly husbands, of the audience indicates the long journey to gender parity that lies ahead.
Walking helps me to understand places, so I started the podcast historicity, a series of audio walking tours that explore how cities got to be the way they are. Himid is right that women often did not physically build cities. But some did, and many more wove the social infrastructures that still shape our experience of cities now. The single women of Grosvenor Square who used the West End to cement their social status and political influence. The Bedford Estate that birthed the British Museum. The eighteenth-century businesswoman Eleanor Coade, whose stone still holds up many buildings in Bloomsbury today.
We must be aware of the difference between observation and participation, something highlighted in Van Gogh House London’s recent exhibition on the Brixton-based community activist Olive Morris. Indeed, we shouldn’t seek to ‘occupy’ the city nor ‘do it like men’, as Himid suggested. Rather, we should seek to do it better, not to own but share spaces with each other.
Women’s Journeys in the City and Beyond is part of Making Modernism at the Royal Academy, on show until 12 February 2023. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘Doors are hard to open because men designed them. Steps too steep because men designed them. If I was designing a city from scratch, sure, it would have no men in it at all. But as women, we have to reclaim, to occupy, half the city.’
So said the Turner Prize-winner Lubaina Himid CBE RA, at Women’s Journeys in the City and Beyond, a talk organised by the Royal Academy as part of Making Modernism. The landmark exhibition points to the parallel developments in urbanisation and women’s rights in the early 1900s, and the city as a space where women could find and create opportunities. From Käthe Kollwitz to Paula Modersohn-Becker, none of the four ‘German’ painters on show trod the same path.
Women’s Journeys took a similarly plural and interdisciplinary approach to its discussion, as interested in what women have to say about things other than being a woman. Himid joined Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, and British architect Stephanie Macdonald OBE, for a nuanced discussion of women’s experiences of space. Chair Ella Whelan chalked in her own interest in literary modernism, and more contemporary, complex questions about street lighting, personal safety, and Sarah Everard.
Drawing from her local community, Stephanie Macdonald highlighted how women have blurred the boundary - perhaps the binary – between public and private spaces, creating the ‘connective tissue’ that makes cities work. She also advocates for ‘imperfect’ architectural design, respecting the dust and debris of the past that lingers in a place and gives people a sense of continuity, something that’s even more important in the wake of COVID.
Himid took examples from her touring exhibition Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City. Phyllis Pearsall, for example, walked the streets from 5am every morning to chart the first Geographers’ A-Z. Now contemporary artist Cornelia Parker obliterates landmarks on those very same maps of London.
Found Cities, Lost Objects is populated by the Arts Council Collection, a collection built to ‘lend not borrow’, with artists like Ingrid Pollard offering regional representations. Himid’s favourite journey is the walk over Waterloo Bridge; with respect to her own experiences of living in and leaving London, she admits her own prejudice against the rural.
More peripatetic is Lauren Elkin, who illustrated her relocation from Paris to London through a potted history of the visual arts. In France, women were deemed troublemakers and disruptors for their role at the forefront of the French Revolution (1789), a misogyny that persisted to prejudice women in the Paris Commune a century later, and arguably, still today. We infer that ‘modern’ media have often served as outlets for existing power structures, and thoroughly outdated ideas.
Elkin drove the discussion, drawing as much from Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces (1974) as Laura Grace/Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah (2011). The latter sees London as ‘not only the backdrop but the fabric of encounters’, and Ford herself features photographed holding a beer, or perhaps a Molotov cocktail.
Standing still in one’s place is a defiant assertion of power. Elsewhere, Himid has spoken of how women often struggle to wander aimlessly, as they are socialised to be productive, to be going somewhere. (Perhaps that is why she finds it easier to be alone in urban rather than rural environments.) For young girls, this expectation confines them to playing at home or in shopping centres – schools of consumerism - and less in parks and playgrounds.
Elkin highlighted London King’s Cross as a place where ‘powerful people with more money than us have created playgrounds for us to be yuppies and raise yuppie children’. Indeed, much of the discussion focussed on London – Hackney, Haringey, and Clapham Common. Areas undergoing gentrification, which designs to disconnect people from their surroundings.
Macdonald rightfully stressed the effects of climate change and capitalism on the built environment. Drawing on Kate Raworth’s economics, she highlighted how our surroundings are constructed by economics, and encouraged those who live within them to live in an economically-motivated fashion – but that can change. Like Himid, she was a joking proponent of making public transport free for all women.
But the Benjamin West Lecture Theatre echoed the discussion’s academic, architectural tone. Neither recorded, nor accessible to those outside of London, there’s an assumption of this capital as a standard template for city living. But how would the conversation change with women’s lived experiences in Manchester? In Kreuzberg, Berlin, where all streets and public places are to be named after women until parity is reached with men? Or for women who seek solidarity in ‘online cities’?
Women’s Journeys made no gender generalisations, nor claims to anything biological or essential about womanhood. But it did underscore how these problems - and their solutions - should not be simply women’s responsibility. The few men, mainly husbands, of the audience indicates the long journey to gender parity that lies ahead.
Walking helps me to understand places, so I started the podcast historicity, a series of audio walking tours that explore how cities got to be the way they are. Himid is right that women often did not physically build cities. But some did, and many more wove the social infrastructures that still shape our experience of cities now. The single women of Grosvenor Square who used the West End to cement their social status and political influence. The Bedford Estate that birthed the British Museum. The eighteenth-century businesswoman Eleanor Coade, whose stone still holds up many buildings in Bloomsbury today.
We must be aware of the difference between observation and participation, something highlighted in Van Gogh House London’s recent exhibition on the Brixton-based community activist Olive Morris. Indeed, we shouldn’t seek to ‘occupy’ the city nor ‘do it like men’, as Himid suggested. Rather, we should seek to do it better, not to own but share spaces with each other.
Women’s Journeys in the City and Beyond is part of Making Modernism at the Royal Academy, on show until 12 February 2023. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘Doors are hard to open because men designed them. Steps too steep because men designed them. If I was designing a city from scratch, sure, it would have no men in it at all. But as women, we have to reclaim, to occupy, half the city.’
So said the Turner Prize-winner Lubaina Himid CBE RA, at Women’s Journeys in the City and Beyond, a talk organised by the Royal Academy as part of Making Modernism. The landmark exhibition points to the parallel developments in urbanisation and women’s rights in the early 1900s, and the city as a space where women could find and create opportunities. From Käthe Kollwitz to Paula Modersohn-Becker, none of the four ‘German’ painters on show trod the same path.
Women’s Journeys took a similarly plural and interdisciplinary approach to its discussion, as interested in what women have to say about things other than being a woman. Himid joined Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, and British architect Stephanie Macdonald OBE, for a nuanced discussion of women’s experiences of space. Chair Ella Whelan chalked in her own interest in literary modernism, and more contemporary, complex questions about street lighting, personal safety, and Sarah Everard.
Drawing from her local community, Stephanie Macdonald highlighted how women have blurred the boundary - perhaps the binary – between public and private spaces, creating the ‘connective tissue’ that makes cities work. She also advocates for ‘imperfect’ architectural design, respecting the dust and debris of the past that lingers in a place and gives people a sense of continuity, something that’s even more important in the wake of COVID.
Himid took examples from her touring exhibition Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City. Phyllis Pearsall, for example, walked the streets from 5am every morning to chart the first Geographers’ A-Z. Now contemporary artist Cornelia Parker obliterates landmarks on those very same maps of London.
Found Cities, Lost Objects is populated by the Arts Council Collection, a collection built to ‘lend not borrow’, with artists like Ingrid Pollard offering regional representations. Himid’s favourite journey is the walk over Waterloo Bridge; with respect to her own experiences of living in and leaving London, she admits her own prejudice against the rural.
More peripatetic is Lauren Elkin, who illustrated her relocation from Paris to London through a potted history of the visual arts. In France, women were deemed troublemakers and disruptors for their role at the forefront of the French Revolution (1789), a misogyny that persisted to prejudice women in the Paris Commune a century later, and arguably, still today. We infer that ‘modern’ media have often served as outlets for existing power structures, and thoroughly outdated ideas.
Elkin drove the discussion, drawing as much from Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces (1974) as Laura Grace/Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah (2011). The latter sees London as ‘not only the backdrop but the fabric of encounters’, and Ford herself features photographed holding a beer, or perhaps a Molotov cocktail.
Standing still in one’s place is a defiant assertion of power. Elsewhere, Himid has spoken of how women often struggle to wander aimlessly, as they are socialised to be productive, to be going somewhere. (Perhaps that is why she finds it easier to be alone in urban rather than rural environments.) For young girls, this expectation confines them to playing at home or in shopping centres – schools of consumerism - and less in parks and playgrounds.
Elkin highlighted London King’s Cross as a place where ‘powerful people with more money than us have created playgrounds for us to be yuppies and raise yuppie children’. Indeed, much of the discussion focussed on London – Hackney, Haringey, and Clapham Common. Areas undergoing gentrification, which designs to disconnect people from their surroundings.
Macdonald rightfully stressed the effects of climate change and capitalism on the built environment. Drawing on Kate Raworth’s economics, she highlighted how our surroundings are constructed by economics, and encouraged those who live within them to live in an economically-motivated fashion – but that can change. Like Himid, she was a joking proponent of making public transport free for all women.
But the Benjamin West Lecture Theatre echoed the discussion’s academic, architectural tone. Neither recorded, nor accessible to those outside of London, there’s an assumption of this capital as a standard template for city living. But how would the conversation change with women’s lived experiences in Manchester? In Kreuzberg, Berlin, where all streets and public places are to be named after women until parity is reached with men? Or for women who seek solidarity in ‘online cities’?
Women’s Journeys made no gender generalisations, nor claims to anything biological or essential about womanhood. But it did underscore how these problems - and their solutions - should not be simply women’s responsibility. The few men, mainly husbands, of the audience indicates the long journey to gender parity that lies ahead.
Walking helps me to understand places, so I started the podcast historicity, a series of audio walking tours that explore how cities got to be the way they are. Himid is right that women often did not physically build cities. But some did, and many more wove the social infrastructures that still shape our experience of cities now. The single women of Grosvenor Square who used the West End to cement their social status and political influence. The Bedford Estate that birthed the British Museum. The eighteenth-century businesswoman Eleanor Coade, whose stone still holds up many buildings in Bloomsbury today.
We must be aware of the difference between observation and participation, something highlighted in Van Gogh House London’s recent exhibition on the Brixton-based community activist Olive Morris. Indeed, we shouldn’t seek to ‘occupy’ the city nor ‘do it like men’, as Himid suggested. Rather, we should seek to do it better, not to own but share spaces with each other.
Women’s Journeys in the City and Beyond is part of Making Modernism at the Royal Academy, on show until 12 February 2023. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘Doors are hard to open because men designed them. Steps too steep because men designed them. If I was designing a city from scratch, sure, it would have no men in it at all. But as women, we have to reclaim, to occupy, half the city.’
So said the Turner Prize-winner Lubaina Himid CBE RA, at Women’s Journeys in the City and Beyond, a talk organised by the Royal Academy as part of Making Modernism. The landmark exhibition points to the parallel developments in urbanisation and women’s rights in the early 1900s, and the city as a space where women could find and create opportunities. From Käthe Kollwitz to Paula Modersohn-Becker, none of the four ‘German’ painters on show trod the same path.
Women’s Journeys took a similarly plural and interdisciplinary approach to its discussion, as interested in what women have to say about things other than being a woman. Himid joined Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, and British architect Stephanie Macdonald OBE, for a nuanced discussion of women’s experiences of space. Chair Ella Whelan chalked in her own interest in literary modernism, and more contemporary, complex questions about street lighting, personal safety, and Sarah Everard.
Drawing from her local community, Stephanie Macdonald highlighted how women have blurred the boundary - perhaps the binary – between public and private spaces, creating the ‘connective tissue’ that makes cities work. She also advocates for ‘imperfect’ architectural design, respecting the dust and debris of the past that lingers in a place and gives people a sense of continuity, something that’s even more important in the wake of COVID.
Himid took examples from her touring exhibition Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City. Phyllis Pearsall, for example, walked the streets from 5am every morning to chart the first Geographers’ A-Z. Now contemporary artist Cornelia Parker obliterates landmarks on those very same maps of London.
Found Cities, Lost Objects is populated by the Arts Council Collection, a collection built to ‘lend not borrow’, with artists like Ingrid Pollard offering regional representations. Himid’s favourite journey is the walk over Waterloo Bridge; with respect to her own experiences of living in and leaving London, she admits her own prejudice against the rural.
More peripatetic is Lauren Elkin, who illustrated her relocation from Paris to London through a potted history of the visual arts. In France, women were deemed troublemakers and disruptors for their role at the forefront of the French Revolution (1789), a misogyny that persisted to prejudice women in the Paris Commune a century later, and arguably, still today. We infer that ‘modern’ media have often served as outlets for existing power structures, and thoroughly outdated ideas.
Elkin drove the discussion, drawing as much from Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces (1974) as Laura Grace/Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah (2011). The latter sees London as ‘not only the backdrop but the fabric of encounters’, and Ford herself features photographed holding a beer, or perhaps a Molotov cocktail.
Standing still in one’s place is a defiant assertion of power. Elsewhere, Himid has spoken of how women often struggle to wander aimlessly, as they are socialised to be productive, to be going somewhere. (Perhaps that is why she finds it easier to be alone in urban rather than rural environments.) For young girls, this expectation confines them to playing at home or in shopping centres – schools of consumerism - and less in parks and playgrounds.
Elkin highlighted London King’s Cross as a place where ‘powerful people with more money than us have created playgrounds for us to be yuppies and raise yuppie children’. Indeed, much of the discussion focussed on London – Hackney, Haringey, and Clapham Common. Areas undergoing gentrification, which designs to disconnect people from their surroundings.
Macdonald rightfully stressed the effects of climate change and capitalism on the built environment. Drawing on Kate Raworth’s economics, she highlighted how our surroundings are constructed by economics, and encouraged those who live within them to live in an economically-motivated fashion – but that can change. Like Himid, she was a joking proponent of making public transport free for all women.
But the Benjamin West Lecture Theatre echoed the discussion’s academic, architectural tone. Neither recorded, nor accessible to those outside of London, there’s an assumption of this capital as a standard template for city living. But how would the conversation change with women’s lived experiences in Manchester? In Kreuzberg, Berlin, where all streets and public places are to be named after women until parity is reached with men? Or for women who seek solidarity in ‘online cities’?
Women’s Journeys made no gender generalisations, nor claims to anything biological or essential about womanhood. But it did underscore how these problems - and their solutions - should not be simply women’s responsibility. The few men, mainly husbands, of the audience indicates the long journey to gender parity that lies ahead.
Walking helps me to understand places, so I started the podcast historicity, a series of audio walking tours that explore how cities got to be the way they are. Himid is right that women often did not physically build cities. But some did, and many more wove the social infrastructures that still shape our experience of cities now. The single women of Grosvenor Square who used the West End to cement their social status and political influence. The Bedford Estate that birthed the British Museum. The eighteenth-century businesswoman Eleanor Coade, whose stone still holds up many buildings in Bloomsbury today.
We must be aware of the difference between observation and participation, something highlighted in Van Gogh House London’s recent exhibition on the Brixton-based community activist Olive Morris. Indeed, we shouldn’t seek to ‘occupy’ the city nor ‘do it like men’, as Himid suggested. Rather, we should seek to do it better, not to own but share spaces with each other.
Women’s Journeys in the City and Beyond is part of Making Modernism at the Royal Academy, on show until 12 February 2023. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
