Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

Understanding urban landscape is a prerequisite for engaging with the prevailing issues which control women’s access to space. One such issue is of temporality, which further controls women’s mobility. The urban night-landscape are the spaces of day which are reproduced at night in juxtaposition to spaces of day such that the functionality, sociality, and politics of the space completely changes. Thus, the paper attempts to map the night spatially and temporally through a gendered lens to understand politics of presence and absence of women in the urban night-landscape. Delving to understand the spatialization of women in night-landscape, the paper first tries to understand nature of spaces that are re-produced in the urban night-landscape as occupied by women occupants and also the manner in which places are being made by them. It then tries to bring forth how the (re)construction of counter-spaces and alternative-spaces cater to women’s access in urban night. Further it attempts to unravel the idea of mobility in night spaces as fabricated by women. The qualitative study was contextualised in urban night-landscape of Delhi, India while drawing from everyday experiences of the women accessing and wishing to access night-landscape for leisure and work through an in-depth engagement with them. The study undertaken thus helps in understanding the reproduction of urban night landscape as largely masculine where women are seen making a ‘purposive movement’. It also throws light on how process of gendering as well as production of gendered spaces operates in night spaces through the practices of leisure.