Tracing Multicultural Cities From the Perspective of Women's Everyday Lives

Abstract

The article discusses everyday life in multicultural cities from a feminist perspective. It aims to engage, theoretically and through empirical research, with everyday life, a concept which brings to the foreground of inquiry a variety of urban experiences and reveals the mutual constitution of gender and place/space. Everyday life is connected to places where different women and men, as individuals, have to live, think and act (in terms of negotiation and/or reconciliation).They construct their everyday life, their personal identities and relations, drawing upon — and, simultaneously, negotiating with — existing macro-level spatial, temporal and discursive structures/meanings. In the context of geographical debates, the study of everyday life starts from the subject's everyday spatio-temporal practices and experiences, aiming to show not only how they are organized by socio-spatial relations and structures, but also how people's (everyday) actions (re)produce and (trans)-form these relations and structures. In this line of thought, space/place is understood as particular constellations of social relations and practices, with local and supralocal determinants, meeting and weaving together in a particular locality. The article will discuss such relations and practices drawing from research in Athens.