Cities, feminism and the 5 million. Last week's anti-Trump Women's Marches drew more than a million marchers in the US and almost five million worldwide; 750,000 in LA; 10,000 in Sydney; 673 cities globally; no arrests. The monstrous regiment made itself serenely, urbanely felt. What, if anything, does this mean for our first conservative female Premier?
Baird's administration was like the worst kind of husband: controlling, humourless and puritanical, ultra-straight, ultra-dull, ultra-male. Chainsaw Mike. Bulldozer Mike. Motorway Mike. The Baird years were all boofheads and bulldozers, pin-stripes and steel-caps. Demolish, concrete, consult, in that order. Question is, should we expect anything different from a premier of the XX persuasion?
The answer, before you get cross, may have as much to do with the nature of cities, as the difference – or not – between genders.
Years ago, as a know-nothing twenty-something in London, I fluked a job in an ancient Westminster publishing house. My position, till then, had been reserved for the thoroughly august – John Betjeman, Osbert Lancaster, Reyner Banham – so the sense of plumbless orthodoxy, of being held within something, was intense.
This was reinforced by my boss, a progressive old-school journo who expected everyone to smoke all day, drink from lunchtime and do the thoroughly reprehensible by night. (Naturally, on most fronts, I declined.) Said boss travelled widely and often, always returning to the filthy lanes and filthier habits of inner London with the unalloyed delight of a child regaining its mama. This was my first and most memorable lesson in the city as nurturing interior, as existential foothold. City as mother.
Cities I'd known to that point were mostly of the sprawling, suburban, modernist variety, where everything yearns for the evident surface and the only shared interiors to speak of are malls and car parks. So the idea that a city itself could be an interior – that the entire labyrinth of a city's external spaces could constitute some kind of home, deep and cave-mysterious – was revelatory.
For me, it turned the city inside out. I had not the slightest interest in city-as-machine. Still don't. Then, as now, those countless earnest tomes on urban economics and planning and transport bored me witless. Could anything be less engaging, or less true to reality? It's almost like those very scholars were part of the masculinist-modernist plot to repel from the city everything warm, complex, organic or heartfelt and so reserve for themselves the nasty concrete thing that became the CBD.
As a kid, given the choice between this dry, synchronous, puritan city and the wild extravagances of nature – with its organelles and valencies, its hunting and pumping and mitochondria and death – I'd always chosen nature. No contest. But city-as-habitat changed all this. I was gripped.
I tell you this because I think the cold, stern mid-century view has re-emerged, both in the NSW government and, curiously, that of Trump.
"I can't believe they're trying to take us back to the '50s. It's ridiculous," said 84-year-old Dolores Manny, president of McHenry County Illinois Citizens for Choice and tireless campaigner for women's reproductive rights at the Women's March in Washington DC. I was immediately reminded of Sydney Greens MP Jenny Leong's description of Westconnex: "This 1950s 'solution' to Sydney's traffic congestion problems won't work – and will cost us dearly."
And while, at first glance, reproductive choice and motorways may seem unconnected, they are in truth different aspects of the same instrumentalist mindset, objectifying everything and valuing it strictly in terms of its usefulness to the central player: man.
We, having grown up with this anthropocentrism, may think it hardwired. In fact, even within human history it's a tiny blip, funnelling us into the geological cleft stick now known as the anthropocene. The anthropocene is not the era of human existence per se, but – beginning (arguably) with the industrial revolution – the period during which human activity came to dominate earth's environment and climate.
Is there any other way of humans living on earth? Answer, yes. Is there any way of humans living on earth in their current numbers? Answer – we don't know, and can only hope we stay around long enough to find out.
Which returns us to the Women's Marches. They weren't exclusively female nor – controversially – did they include all women. But they were distinctly women's marches, collecting empathy-driven issues (women's rights, education, immigration, equality, health) and taking them to the heart of female space: the city.
In the post-Trump world this split - between the warm feminist city and cold, misogynist sprawl - is suddenly, startlingly evident.
I know what you're going to say. The city isn't feminist, or even feminine. But let's think about that. The traditional city was always at least as much habitat as mercantile machine. Spatially, of course, it reflected this, offering a protective, nurturing interior - walled, deep and often underground - always more maternal than paternal. From the Bible, with its classic wife-whore dualism (Jerusalem as a bride "adorned for her husband" and Babylon as "mother of harlots and of earth's abominations...") to Jung, city-mother has been a familiar trope.
Modernism erased all that. Its founding voices were Marinetti's, with his mad but wonderful 1909 Futurist Manifesto ("we will glorify war...militarism, patriotism...and scorn for woman...we will destroy the museums, libraries, academies... feminism...") and Corbusier's, with his eloquent paeans to everything projectile. Modernism, thus exhilarated, strove to banish women to the burbs and iron all femaleness – complexity, interiority, community, shelter – from city space.
This, the modern project, was heroic and thrilling. It was also puritanical, controlling and – in its desire to smoothe, whiten and concrete everything – deeply, deeply angry. Baird may not know it. He probably thinks he was innocently worshipping the infrastructure gods. But he was angry modernism's vassal.
Will Berejiklian continue his vassalage? Who knows? But if the Women's Marches mean the push to reclaim the city's female aspect has begun I say, bring it on. #thefutureisfemale
Twitter @emfarrelly
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