Leslie Kern

Kern starts from the concrete: a pram on metro stairs, a park that becomes frightening after a certain hour, a journey that is not home-to-work but nursery-to-doctor-to-shops. The city is built around a commute that is not the majority's.

Her second book dismantles the idea that gentrification is a natural and inevitable process. She argues that each step — a rezoning, a permit, an eviction — is a concrete decision somebody took, and that calling it inevitable is the most effective way of not arguing about it.

A Canadian geographer, professor of geography and environment and director of gender studies at Mount Allison University, in New Brunswick, Kern first studied condominium housing in Toronto and the promise of freedom sold to women buyers, in Sex and the Revitalized City (2010), and then the gentrification of neighbourhoods such as the Junction, in Toronto, through everyday practices and gender.

Feminist City (2019), written in the first person and translated into more than a dozen languages, turned that research into a book for general readers: the city of men, of moms, of fear, of friends and of possibility, and the question of whom each street, bus timetable and park serves. Gentrification Is Inevitable and Other Lies (2022) dismantles the commonplaces used to justify displacement. She is one of the most widely read voices of contemporary feminist urbanism.

Kern also challenges the usual answer to women's fear in the city: more police, more cameras, more floodlights. She argues that these measures often do little for those who need protection most, and can bring racialised, poor or trans women more surveillance than safety. Her alternative is less spectacular: public toilets, benches, frequent night transport, childcare near stations and streets that are alive at all hours, which make the city safer because they make it more used.