Same city,different men,different urban worlds: Enriching feminist urban research through attention to masculinities

Romit Chowdhury's City of Men builds on and consolidates the author's long-standing ethnographic work about men and mobilities in India, where he has explored the connection between masculinities and urban space. The idea that cities are male-dominated environments may seem familiar to readers: feminist geographers and urban studies scholars have scrutinised cities as androcentric spaces and dedicated countless pages to conceptualising (and challenging) the obdurate public/private male/female dualisms. Yet, the matter has largely (though not exclusively) been approached through studying the mechanisms that contribute to women's exclusion from, rather than men's presence in, public space. As Chowdhury remarks in the opening lines of City of Men, however, ‘in South Asian urban landscapes, men are everywhere’ (p. 1). It is perhaps men's very omnipresence in the city that accounts for their taken-for-grantedness in urban scholarship. Chowdhury's approach to the question of how it is that cities come to be coded as masculine is therefore relevant and necessary. Indeed, in seeking to understand the co-production of gender and urban space, we need to be asking about men, too.

To being to excavate men's lives in the city (to unearth what men do in cities as men), the author presents us with two questions – one empirical and one theoretical. First, he asks in what ways do men inhabit city spaces and, second, how does this inhabitation produce gendered cities. He grounds these questions in the context of everyday mobility, recognising that transportation is ripe with sociability and stitches together the social and material fabric of the city. Much of the transport and gender literature deals with the obstacles and instances of violence women and sexual minorities face in transport and how this contributes to gendering cities. Feminist critics have also noted that transport is a male-dominated sector, shaped by masculinist epistemologies that undermine women's mobility needs. While we should not abandon this research agenda, we might benefit from asking: in what other ways does transport (re)produce gender relations? How do differences between men find expression in the social-infrastructural world of transport? Through five chapters, and in a rich, ethnographic, narrative style, the author details the everyday lives of taxi and autorickshaw drivers in Kolkaka – their struggles, life stories, and fears.

Yes, men, too, can experience the city as fearsome.

Yet, what Chowdhury seeks to demonstrate is that cities become gendered not solely through conflict, but also via cooperation between strangers, both men and women. This is the book's key contribution to the sociological literature and that also ought to motivate feminist scholars in cognate disciplines to explore cooperation as city-making. Such efforts are already underway elsewhere: solidarity, care, fun, pleasure, and friendship are increasingly being studied as forms of feminist politics of the urban (Gqola et al., 2024). However, transport workers are seldom the focus of such research, and, in this sense, Chowdhury's book is also an invitation to consider their pivotal role in shaping urban life, including their role in reproducing patriarchal relations.

Chowdhury grounds these questions in Kolkata, India, and devotes the first chapter of the book to contextualising the transport and mobility landscape. Here, the author details the social and historical development of transport policy in India, and carefully explains the development of transport governance in Kolkata – a city where all transport workers, without exception, are men. In the context of rapidly growing South Asian cities, a mounting population and sprawling urbanisation increase transport demands, put pressure on existing infrastructures, and reconfigure gendered labour regimes. None of these are solely technical matters, however. Rather, as the book aims to show, these are also socially meaningful changes where ideas of gender and masculinity come to the fore as people navigate the challenges of everyday urban mobility. The chapter introduces the two types of working-class men at the centre of the book: autorickshaw drivers who are ‘locals’ and follow specific neighbourhood routes; and taxi drivers who are migrants from nearby states in India and whose routes cover the entirety of the city.

The second chapter turns to the sociality of transport. Both gender and mobility structure much of everyday urban life and the relationship between the two is well established: while gender roles and expectations give way to distinctive motives for, and patterns of, movement, interactions in transport and embodied experiences of moving in the city produced gendered realities of urban space. The chapter turns to the latter aspect, underscoring that transport is also cut across by expectations of comportment and moral values. That is, of particular forms of interaction between men and women and a politics of copresence that contribute to gendering infrastructures. The author seeks to reveal how materiality and masculinity constitute one another through people's everyday encounters with urban infrastructures.

Chapter Three begins with a vignette that hints at one of the book's running themes: different men experience the city in different ways, and the book challenges a totalising notion of all men everywhere as ‘owners’ of all cities everywhere. Which men and which forms of masculinity? In centring migrant male transport workers, Chowdhury shows how masculinities are inflected by class, caste, religion, and the rural–urban divide. In this sense, contained in City of Men are also stories of migration and a longing for the familiar security of village life. I found this point particularly compelling. While geographers have long acknowledged the mutual imbrication of the rural and the urban through the circulation of goods and people, including through conceptualising flows of gendered domestic labour, the focus on constructions of masculinity delivers a novel way to think about the relationship between the rural and the urban.

In Chapter Four, Chowdhury turns to policing as a central aspect of life in the city. Encounters with traffic police are part and parcel of transport workers’ lives and, in reinforcing particular moral visions of street and family lives, policing produces the city as male space. A tension belies these encounters, however, and how the city comes to be gendered as masculine is not straightforward. Policing pulls transport workers in different directions (both constitutive of masculinity): in trying to fulfil their role as good men who provide for their family, transport workers may engage in behaviours that are at odds with the figure of the good, law-abiding (male) urban subject. Moreover, variously positioned men (with regards to religion, mode of transport and region of origin) experience encounters with police with varying degrees of hostility that may contribute to their marginalisation. Yet, interactions with the police are not solely confrontational. They are shown here to be also inflected by a form of cooperation that the author conceptualises as ‘homosocial trust’ – a mutual understanding that emerges from heteronormative masculinity as common ground.

The final chapter brings morality to the fore. Morality is central to how patriarchy is constructed and how subjects are disciplined into their gender roles; how mental maps of the city come into being, as places come to be codified through moral perceptions; and to the ways in which encounters in cities variously render them ‘safe’ or ‘good’. Although morality is a running theme throughout the book, this chapter focuses on how people negotiate and make sense of everyday copresence on the basis of their moral inclinations, and how moral principles structure cities as gendered.

As a feminist urban geographer, I welcome and embrace Chowdhury's contribution to feminist urban studies. The affirmation that cities are not gender neutral has become commonplace, but part of not taking gender for granted means excavating men and masculinities; and how masculinity, too, takes shape through the messy encounters between people and the world. Doing so is crucial to advance a feminist urban agenda. If we seek cities that are safe for women, children, and feminised people, then we also need to interrogate men's lives and attend to their nuances, including considerations of how men care for their communities during the course of everyday life and labour (Gamble and Dávalos, 2019).

Destabilising the workings of hegemonic power requires that we interrogate that which we have naturalised; that we make apparent that which is so ubiquitous that it ‘need not be named’. It is, of course, challenging to research something that is so omnipresent that it may be difficult to witness. In this sense, Chowdhury's work is noteworthy for its ethnographic rigour and careful attention to how masculinity ‘shows up’ in everyday interactions. The vignettes and descriptions that bring this ethnography to life are captivating and immerse the reader in the hubbub of Kolkata's streets and in the lives of the men that are at the centre of this research. The author's intersectional sensibility is one of the book's strengths, and apparent in City of Men is the difficulty of speaking a singular masculinity, embodied equally by all men. Nevertheless, Chowdhury is cautious in warning that, differences between men notwithstanding, ‘the commonalities of male experience in the city – in addition to those of class – […] help forge a sliver of understanding between men otherwise placed in hierarchical relation to one another’ (p. 136).

Still, and despite the author's acknowledgement in the concluding chapter, some critics might insist that women fade into the background of this narrative. Chowdhury tries to resolve this by reminding us that while gender is indeed relational, masculinity is not only relational to femininity but also to other forms of masculinity. This is, of course, a fair point, but I am left with a sense that more attention should be given to the violence that men inflict upon women in transport scenarios and what this says about (certain forms of) masculinity. This is a fact that the author introduces early in the text, but does not pick up again in the remainder of the book. Moreover, while the book deals with heteronormative masculinity at length, I am left wondering how, if at all, queerness and resistance to masculinity show up in everyday mobility.

As a final point, I want to signal the book's contribution to thinking about global masculinities. When read from elsewhere in the global South (from Latin America, to be precise) City of Men is an invitation to question expressions of masculinity closer to home. Feminist urban research in Latin America has been gaining significant traction over the last decade, but men, masculinities, and the specific workings of ‘machismo’ in cities and transport systems of the region remain under-examined. Situating masculinities research beyond the North compels us to think about the category of ‘men’ beyond Eurocentric notions of masculinity; beyond whiteness and beyond the middle class. City of Men illustrates how different masculinities take shape and find expression in a variety of contexts, driving home the point that ‘men’ are not universal subjects.