Gender and the city

Alliances between urbanism, feminism and the new connectivity may spell the end of a man's world.

The smartphone is the new smoking. It's the cigarette packet size thing you take with you everywhere. It's what you do if you're waiting for a bus or nervous at a party; what you light up the minute you emerge from the cinema. The smartphone is the marginally antisocial crutch you cannot live without.

But, if it is the new smoking, what are the dangers? I'm not just thinking brain tumours here. If it does, as some say, signify a whole new social paradigm, does the new connectivity come with hidden costs?

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Modernism's take on connectivity was linear and utilitarian, its effect as much separative as connective. Motorways allowed fast traffic but separated it from all other traffic with superhighways that were themselves barriers in the landscape; the consolidation of land for skyscrapers obliterated laneways, the capillary-system of cities; use-zoning deliberately separated nesting from working and male from female, while the widespread deployment of cul-de-sacs, clover leafs and one-way traffic systems coarsened city texture, trampling the connectivity that was its essence and consistently preferring the car-encapsulated human to the human on the street.

A classic example is Parramatta, where fine historic bones are all but obscured beneath a plethora of heavy-handed interventions, but which would instantly revert to some semblance of life were the yoke of modernism lifted. But contemporary examples abound as well, like Melbourne's Docklands and, I fear, Barangaroo.

The alliances between urbanism, feminism and the new connectivity are little explored. Yet it is clear that, just as modernism deliberately banished women to the suburbs as bait to draw men from the evils of the urban night, so postmodern urbanism, in rediscovering the traditional city, has striven both to repopulate the city with non-corporate human life and to reassert feminine values.