METHODOLOGY
This dissertation will place women within the city of Liverpool, using narratives to highlight the experiences of being a woman in the city. The following narratives take direction from Leslie Kern’s recent book Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World. Kern uses history, personal experience and popular culture, with a feminist geographical lens, to expose the social inequalities of the man-made environment, whilst also laying out hopes for a new urban future. With a similar approach, this dissertation will create fictional characters, which are able to map the city from varied vantage points. The method of narrative writing has provided an effective form to explore information, enabling the synthesis between existing literature and personal experience. This forms an experiential collage of being a woman in the city of Liverpool. The narratives follow the feminist mode of writing with a ficto-critical approach. As described in Writing Architectures by Helene Frichot, “Architects and fiction writers share the same ambition: to imagine new worlds into being.” (Frichot, 2020) The narratives aim to challenge the gender inequalities in current societies, by critiquing the man-made environment, and to disrupt the habitual ways of perceiving women in the city.
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Additionally, narrative writing as storytelling is an accessible way to convey information, with an immediacy that other written forms lack - What is it like to be in someone else’s shoes? This direct approach aims to help women understand their own relationship with the built environment and to help others, including future practitioners, to understand how the environment is a problem for women. In these narratives, women are not only placed in the city but they are active. They are walking, wandering, observing. The women represented in these narratives are arguably flâneuses. The author Lauren Elkin painted the woman back into the city and rethinks the identity of the flâneuse in her book, where she explores the lives of wandering women, including herself. She describes the flâneuse: “She voyages out, and goes where she’s not supposed to; she forces us to confront the ways in which worlds like home and belonging are used against women. She is a determined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.” Elkin, 2016
