Identity Issues and Local Governance: Women's Everyday Life in the City

Abstract

This paper universalizes a particular dilemma. It presents a localized case of the appropriation and 'privatization' of urban public spaces in ultra orthodox communities in the Mea Shearim neighbourhood of Jerusalem in the name of religious identity. The basic dilemma that this paper ponders relates to the localized case presented: whether such a situation, which denies secular women's rights to some public parts of the city, can also be accepted as an expression of the daily religious practices of a distinct community. The first reaction of feminists to such exclusionary practices in the city might be negative, but discussing such issues in depth reveals the different meanings and implications of such situations that force one to deal with the sometimes contradictory meanings of the right to the city, and the contrasts inherent between these meanings. These dilemmas become more and more apparent in multi-ethnicized, multi-sacredized and multinationalized global urban spaces and will be part of the city governance's daily occupation, as diversity becomes an increasingly important issue in new global spaces. This paper universalizes a particular dilemma. It presents a localized case of the appropriation and 'privatization' of urban public spaces in ultra orthodox communities in the Mea Shearim neighbourhood of Jerusalem in the name of religious identity. This action of secralization of the neighbourhood public spaces challenges and in fact may be seen as denying secular women's rights to use the city's spaces in that it constructs the neighbourhood as a modesty gated area. This is a localized example of universalized realities in multi-religious, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic urban spaces which have become homes for the extensive flows of trans-migrants who transform urban spaces into places of shared identity. The paper discusses a much broader reality in global urban spaces today where these multiple ethnicities, cultures and nationalities inhabit and appropriate the same public spaces sometimes in ways that other individuals and communities might find abusive. I discuss this universal phenomenon by focusing on the discourse between the individual right to

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