The traffic between urban geography and masculinities studies

If urban dispossession is achieved through violence and spatial exclusion, how does social power in cities operate when overt violence is in abeyance and the marginalised seem to have conditional access to urban resources? City of Men (Chowdhury, 2023) takes up this question by foregrounding men's lives and the intractability of patriarchal power in cities. Through an ethnographic engagement with the mobile lives of autorickshaw and taxi drivers in present-day Kolkata, it offers an understanding of how mundane acts of cooperation between strangers and the publicly familiar – which are often premised on heteronormative morality – become a mode of reproducing the city as a space of patriarchal power.

The book is oriented by four vectors of scholarly inquiry. The first of these is the idea that those who socially appear as ‘men’ have historically been an ‘absent presence’, taken for granted instead of being scrutinised, in both social spaces and scholarship (Hearn and Howson, 2020). Borrowing this analytical cue from critical studies of men and masculinities, the book tasks itself with revealing the regimes of power through which certain social subjects become men. Secondly, it engages with social geography's preoccupation with the relationship between subjectivity and space – what has been characterised as the ‘spatial imperative of subjectivity’ (Probyn, 2003) – to consider the co-production of masculinity, mobility, and urban space. A third source of inspiration lies in the ‘mobilities paradigm’ and ethnographies of transportation that have rendered transit spaces as a social arena where urban co-existence is negotiated (Yazıcı, 2013). Fourthly, the book dialogues with feminist writings on cities, particularly women's negotiations of stranger violence (Infante-Vargas and Boyer, 2022) and the ideological apparatus that withholds the urban outdoors from women by tying femininity to dwelling. The book represents an effort to understand how cultural ideals of masculinity infuse the everyday production of the city, especially in relation to space and movement. It identifies the idioms of masculinity – variously related to fatherhood, marriage, camaraderie, filial ties, heterosexual lust, mastery of space, risk-taking, memories of boyhood, and family honour – through which both public transport and the city become ideologically inimical to the presence of women and feminised bodies, even as they conditionally accommodate them.

In Bridges' (2026) reading of the book, ethnographic immersion in transit spaces uncovers ‘nuances within the dual role of public transit as both a site of conflict and a platform for everyday acts of cooperation and trust’. Merriman (2026) remarks that although the book highlights the different mobility experiences of different groups of transport workers, it also ‘focuses on the multiple immobilities of these working-class drivers’, stuck in social disadvantage even as they keep the city moving. In the accounts of migrant taxi drivers’ negotiation of the different gender regimes of city and village, Castañeda (2026) finds a ‘novel way to think about the relationship between the rural and the urban’. Adeniyi-Ogunyankin (2026) sees value in considering men's public lives in the city in tandem with their private lives as providers. ¹ All four commentaries in this review forum underscore the importance of urban scholars moving beyond a singular focus on hostility and conflict to also consider other modalities – cooperation, trust, camaraderie, humour, play – through which social inequalities are reproduced in the city. Strangers helping one another, engaging in banter, sharing anecdotes in passing, flirting, and gently chiding one another, capture what people think they owe others in public spaces and what they can expect from others in the urban outdoors. Such modes of interaction, which play out alongside animosity between hierarchically placed groups, provide urban geographers with rich material for understanding what holds together the urban social.

The commentaries also remark on the multiple styles of masculine performance that appear in cities and, indeed, one of the principal aims of the book was to demonstrate how this plurality within working-class masculinity is bound up with the politics of mobility and urban space. Yet, even as masculinity finds expression in a range of styles and is accomplished differently, the ethnography in the book suggests there is also a unison underlying this plurality, one which derives from a shared moral investment in certain normative ideas about manhood. When men collectively uphold morally exalted ideals of masculinity in everyday encounters in the city, they may make public spaces conditionally safe for some women, but they continue to exclude them by ennobling men's right to the urban outdoors above everyone else's. It seems to me that an attentiveness to the co-production of masculinities and city life has enormous analytical purchase for both urban geography and critical studies of men and masculinities. In dialogue with the remarks offered by the participants in this review forum, I would like to hint at some ways in which such conceptual traffic between these two fields might flow.

In her commentary, Castañeda (2026) astutely observes that ‘It is perhaps men's very omnipresence in the city that accounts for their taken-for-grantedness in urban scholarship’. One might equally say that it is perhaps the unacknowledged metrocentricity of scholarship on masculinity that explains why urban processes have remained underexplored in critical studies on men and masculinities. The growing body of urban scholarship on improvised lives seldom addresses issues of masculinity when it reads the alliances, transactions, and solidarities between people living on the urban margins as a ‘forward momentum, even in small increments; the feeling that one wasn't stuck in place… that allowed one a sense of agency’ (Simone, 2021). The vast literature on homosociality in critical studies on men and masculinities, on the other hand, seldom attributes agency to bonds between men, reading camaraderie between cis-gender heterosexual men mostly as a defense of hegemonic masculinity and hence as reproducing gender inequality. In his review, when Bridges (2026) speaks of a ‘reconceptualization of masculinities as enacted through labor, spatial practices, and moral codes’, I see such conceptual rethinking as the outcome of a bidirectional traffic of analytical insights between urban geography and masculinities studies. The mobile careers of male transport vehicle operators in Kolkata bear witness to how homosociality on city streets can provide men on the urban margins a tenuous claim on the city, even as camaraderie between men codes the city as a male space. Thus, improvised urban lives, when seen through the lens of homosociality, appear simultaneously as a ‘rhythm of endurance’ and as modes of reproducing the heteronormative city. In the same way, men's homosociality, when filtered through the prism of urban improvisation, appears not just as a defense of patriarchal ideals but also as a resource for men marginalised by other vectors of inequality to survive and find joy amidst disenfranchisement.

As I show in City of Men, working-class men in cities are systemically pitted against the law and encounter the everyday state as a moral choice between either being the good urban subject or the good family man. To be one, you have to relinquish the other. In inhabiting the city as workers in the informal economy, working-class men attempt to stave off two kinds of failures – the failure to be good men (for being unable to earn sufficiently) and the failure to be good urban subjects (for not abiding by the law). What might it mean to revisit urban geographical theorizations of urban informality through the prism of masculinities, the divergent pull of these two subject positions between being either law abiding or a good family man? Equally, how might human geographers’ theorizations of urban informality, for instance questions of legitimacy that many have discussed, refine understandings of both the crisis of masculinity and crisis tendencies in patriarchal arrangements that may recast dominant norms of gender and sexuality? In the concluding paragraph of her commentary, Adenji-Ogunyankin (2026) asks, ‘What would it mean to unread Kolkata as a patriarchal city of men – one where women's presence in public is not an anomaly, and is instead normalised, valued and recognized as central to the (re)production of urban space?’ My sense is that a steady conceptual traffic between studies of masculinities and urban geography might offer some partial answers to this vital question.