Leslie Kern is the author of The Feminist City — Claiming Space in a Man-Made World, a book which, since publication in 2019, has sparked conversations between those who design the city, and those who study it, and who live in it. In this episode, she speaks with Reuben J. Brown about the inequities and complexities of our dominant urban designs and ways of living, while looking towards more liveable, more just, alternatives. And the new urban world Leslie Kern imagines in the Feminist City isn’t designed in a top-down, universalising way — like the utopian urban dreams of the mid 20th Century. Rather, she seeks existing and historical pockets of feminist cities and asks what it would mean to extrapolate those models more broadly.  Leslie’s academic background is in gender studies: she’s currently an associate professor of geography and environment, and director of women’s and gender studies, at Mount Allison University in Canada. And she brings this viewpoint to discussing the city: acknowledging the complex layers of physical infrastructure and human relationships; private homes, and public squares, that make up the places we live.  Throughout this conversation, you’ll hear us reference writers, and design collectives who have imagined feminist alternatives, and often put them into practice. And to learn from the success of these projects, is to acknowledge that if design is to have an impact on the culture of patriarchy, it first has to change its own culture; move away from the notion of the master architect, and do a lot more listening from the bottom-up.