By Dr May East
Women and cities - what it is the Earth asking from us? (Vert by Diez Office, AHEC, OMC°C)
I like to think about the hundreds of activations, publications, conversations, master’s and PhD theses, handbooks, gatherings, walkabouts and official conferences under the banner ‘women and cities’, as an emerging rhizomatic movement.
The image of a rhizome, a plant stem that grows horizontally underground, sending out roots and shoots from its’ nodes across the soil subsurface, is compelling. Unlike a tree, which has a fixed root structure leading to a branching hierarchical form, a rhizome has no central trunk or foundation. It grows and spreads in all directions without a clear beginning nor end.
While trees have a hierarchical structure of trunk, branches and roots, rhizomes spreads in all directions without a clear beginning nor end.
‘Gender-sensitive place making’, ‘feminist urbanism’, ‘gendered city’, ‘feminist placemaking’. There exist as many names as shoots emerging from the nodes connected through a rhizome structure, manifesting as a decentralized system shaping and shifting dominant narratives of urban planning theory – and hopefully practice – while bridging the historic urban planning gender gap.
The term ‘movement’ here is understood more like a sezione of a musical composition than ‘an organised effort’ spearhead by an institution, a ‘dividual’ or one hemisphere of the globe. Margaret Wheatley, in her insightful article Using Emergence to Take Social Innovations to Scale (2006) speaks about the life-cycle of emergence, which begins with networks, shifts into communities of learning and eventually evolves into systems capable of global influence.
“Emergence is the fundamental scientific explanation for how local changes can materialize as global systems of influence. As a change theory, it offers methods and practices to accomplish the systems-wide changes that are so needed at this time.”
— Margaret Wheatley
What follows, are some characteristics of a rhizome which can be found in the emerging movement of women and cities:
Multiple Entry Points
A rhizome can be accessed or understood from any point. There is no single starting point nor linear progression of knowledge. In contrast to more traditional systems that follows a cause-effect or linear path, a rhizomatic movement – like the one engaging women and cities – has multiple pathways which can be entered or exited at various junctures, reflecting the complexity and fluidity of knowledge and practice.
Multiplicity
Rhizomes are not singular but multiple. They consist of many points or nodes that form a network of relationships. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their work A Thousand Plateaus (1980) used the term ‘multiplicity’ to describe systems where no element can stand alone. Rather than discrete entities, everything is interconnected in a dynamic web of relations. This reflects how all these activations are linked and cannot stand alone.
Resilience and Adaptability
Just as a botanical rhizome can survive by sending out new shoots and roots even when parts of it are losing vitality, a philosophical rhizome is resilient and adaptive. Ideas, cultures, or systems based on rhizomatic principles are seen as resistant to control, manipulation, or destruction because they can regenerate or reform from different points. This makes rhizomatic structures inherently resistant to rigid control and even the desire to dominate.
The rhizome metaphor offers the framework for the Buddhist practice of Mudhita –‘your joy is my joy’, ‘your success is my success’ – amongst women. This practice of empathetic contentment deconstructs competitiveness, shifts the focus from comparison to celebration, fosters collaboration and transmutes any sense of rivalry.
— May East
Generative Communication
The concept of rhizome is often used to describe how information spreads across the internet, social media, or global communication networks. In these systems, nodes – like users or posts – are constantly forming, dissolving, and reforming in complex ways. New narratives are grounded in specific places but shared through platforms – LinkedIn, Instagram, WhatsApp Groups – where each post tags another series of nodes that in turn communicates further.
In both the botanical and philosophical sense, rhizomes highlight a model of interconnectedness where multiple nodes can form new connections without a central or hierarchical structure. As the networks of ideas grow through connections and associations – often in unexpected ways – the network evolves organically, becoming more dynamic and pattern generating (rather than pattern following).
The pattern generating nature of churning and turning of ideas. (Chakaia Booker, in the Garment District, NY)
Conclusion
In postmodern thought, the rhizome concept helps us understand the breakdown of grand narratives – universal truths – and shift focus towards singular, local, and interconnected relative truths. Narratives from Vienna, Umeå, Barcelona, Lyon, Glasgow and London – undoubtedly from the Global North – are part of this dialogue and those activating from these nodes should also engage with works such as Against White Feminist by Rafia Zakaria. But these cities narratives are interspaced by unique stories emerging at neighbourhood levels such as the women writers from Rocinha, the largest slum community in Rio de Janeiro, who are engaging in the south-north debates on decolonial, localised feminist knowledge production and placemaking.
The rhizome framework allows us to view things (events, books, papers, speakers, the churning and turning of ideas) in terms of interrelationships rather than in isolation; and to observe patterns of change rather than static ‘snapshots’ while addressing the emerging movement in terms of wholeness rather than in parts. This perspective deepens our understanding of the women and cities debates as a complex, dynamic, and interconnected system, where traditional models of authority and linearity evolve and give way. Instead, it invites us to reassess how the metaphors and models we use to navigate the world play out in this dazzlingly collaborative, future-bound, emerging movement of rethinking and reshaping the mutually constituted relationship between women and cities..
Here are some examples of nodal activation involving rhizomatic interdependencies that have taken place over the past 6 months:
In Belgium – Women of the NEB hosted an exhibition during the New Bauhaus Festival alongside a series of Empowering Women, Public Space and Climate Change talks under the orchestration of Rozina Spinnoy.
In Edinburgh – UN House Scotland has convened three roundtables under the banner Urban Crossroads: where policy meets community hosted at the University of Edinburgh.
In Leeds – Women and Planning: From Theory to Practice Conference hosted by Leeds Beckett University under the guidance of Woman of Influence 2024 Dr Karen Horwood MA FHEA AssocRTPI and Charlotte Morphet MRTPI FRSA AoU.
In New York – UN Women on the occasion of the High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) convened feminists, experts, UN officials and development actors to present and discuss the Gender Equality Accelerators (GEAs) for the SDGs, particularly SDG 5.
In Edinburgh – Shaping the Feminist City within the Curious Festival hosted by Royal Society of Edinburgh facilitated by RSE-fellows Daisy Narayanan MBE and award winning architect Jude Barber.
In the Netherlands – The Gendered City orchestrated a series of events while establishing an international network of practitioners and researchers with various working groups led by the feminist urbanist Nourhan Bassam.
In London – Our City, Our Streets: Women, design and the built environment convened by landscape architect, Marina Milosev and writer and urbanist Jennie Savage FRSA event at the LSE Library.
That which is hidden is always sensed before it is discovered.
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