The (post-)politics of women's urban safety in Manchester, UK.

Abstract

Women's urban safety is a critical issue that received increased media and public attention in the UK in 2021 following the murders of several women in the public spaces of UK cities. This prompted a policy response to the issue of gender-based violence at both national and local scales, providing an opportunity to investigate the emerging concept of the depoliticisation of the women's urban safety in Western neoliberal contexts. This study's objective is to contribute to an understanding of the relationship between discourses on women's urban safety and the post-political city. The study asks how theories of depoliticisation and post-politics can contribute to understandings of women's urban safety in Western neoliberal contexts, and conversely, how a study of women's urban safety can inform theories of depoliticisation and post-politics. The implications of the policy response to the issue of women's urban safety for inclusive urban development are also considered. Theories of depoliticisation are used in this study to contribute to an understanding of the specific mechanisms through which gender and feminism are co-opted and enrolled into depoliticising processes in Western neoliberal contexts. Three mechanisms through which the dominant discourse on women's urban safety is being depoliticised in Manchester are identified: (1) a policy focus on women's safety in public space; (2) the instrumentalization of women's urban safety in the night time economy, and; (3) the revanchist exclusion of lower-income and marginalised urban inhabitants in the name of women's safety. It is confirmed that the depoliticisation of women's urban safety increases the risk of safety and freedom from violence becoming a commodity that is more accessible to privileged urban inhabitants. To develop an alternative, repoliticised understanding of women's urban safety, this study examines the aspects of this issue that are obscured within a depoliticised discourse. A focus on domestic abuse in Manchester reveals the ways in which interpersonal gender-based violence intersects with structural violence, offering a repoliticised understanding of the issue of women's urban safety that moves beyond an emphasis on public space in thinking and practice on women's urban safety. It is argued that social problems such as gender-based violence can be repoliticised if there is a recognition of their relationship to the political economic processes that reproduce urban inequalities, such as austerity urbanism and housing financialisation. By identifying potential sites of repoliticisation where the consensus that lies at the heart of the post-political is being challenged and resisted, this study uses the repoliticisation of women's urban safety to argue for an expanded conceptualisation of the 'political' within the post-political thesis that avoids overstating the dominance of neoliberalism and looks to its 'outside' to find the possibility for change. It is recommended that future research continues to reframe women's urban safety in ways that makes this issue more inclusive to prevent safety becoming an unevenly distributed commodity in Western neoliberal contexts.

Date of Award	6 Jan 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Diana Mitlin (Supervisor)