Intersectionality in Urban Space: A City for Everyone

Intersectionality in urban space is the approach that analyses how gender, race, class, age, disability and sexual orientation combine to produce different experiences of the same city, so that a street, a bus or a park is not the same for all its users. The American legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the concept in 1989 to explain why the discrimination Black women suffered fitted neither feminism nor anti-racism on its own, and urban studies have adopted it, with authors such as Leslie Kern, to correct a planning that for a century designed for a single user: the adult, white, healthy man with a car.

Kimberlé Crenshaw: the crossroads and intersecting oppressions

Crenshaw started from court cases in which Black women alleged employment discrimination and the courts denied it because the company hired women, white ones, and Black people, men. Her crossroads metaphor describes how oppressions intersect and produce a specific harm, different from the sum of their parts. Carried into the city, the idea shows that the migrant woman cleaning offices before dawn, the young Black man stopped by police, the older person with reduced mobility in a neighbourhood without lifts or the trans woman in a segregated toilet live exclusions that no single category explains and no sectoral policy solves.

Leslie Kern: fear, care and access distributed intersectionally

Kern, in Feminist City (2019), applied that lens to everyday life and showed that fear, care and access are distributed intersectionally. The city of fear is not the same for a white middle-class woman as for a Black woman, whose sense of safety includes the police as a threat; the city of moms is not the same for those with a car as for those pushing a pram to the bus; the city of work is not the same for the professional as for the undocumented domestic worker. Intersectionality forces the question, before every aggregate figure on women or migrants, of who is hidden in the average.

Disaggregated data and audits: intersectionality in practice

In practice, intersectional analysis changes how urban data are collected and used. Mobility surveys that only distinguish by sex hide that older women in poor neighbourhoods barely travel at night; safety statistics that do not cross race and gender miss the specific violence against racialised women; accessibility plans that address disability without income ignore those who cannot pay for an adapted taxi. Cities such as Vienna, Barcelona and Montreal have begun to disaggregate data, run audits that cross variables and design with groups that gather those intersections rather than with generic representatives.

Designing for those who accumulate the most barriers

Design and policy responses are concrete. Transport with frequencies at care hours and social fares that reach migrant women workers. Public space with lighting, visibility and presence that does not depend on the police, designed with the women of each neighbourhood. Housing that combines physical accessibility and affordability. Inclusive, accessible public toilets. And participation that guarantees time, translation, childcare and transport so that those who accumulate the most barriers can be at the table. Crenshaw insists that intersectionality is not a list of identities but a tool for seeing structures of power, and Kern adds that those structures are made of kerbs, timetables and stares.

The lesson for planning is that there is no average user. Every decision about a street, a stop or a square affects differently people located at different crossings of gender, race, class, age and ability, and a just city is one that designs for those who accumulate the most barriers, because what works for them works for everyone. Intersectionality, born in a courtroom, has become the most precise instrument for uncovering experiences of the city and correcting those planning failed to see.