At peak hours — at the start and end of the workday — you will spot women in the crowds at commuting hubs such as bus stops and local train stations, but even then, in a relatively friendlier-to-women city like Mumbai, rarely is more than 20% of that crowd female. What is really visible is the overwhelming presence of men everywhere.
But as Why Loiter ’s research shows, there are spaces in the city where the otherwise vexing question, ‘Where are the women?’ doesn’t need to be raised: these are the modern shopping malls and the chain coffee shops. Walk in here on a weekday afternoon and you will see these swarming with women — alone or in small or larger groups. They are window shopping, purchasing, eating lunch, drinking cappuccinos or just strolling around and hanging out with their phones and friends.
Increasingly dotting the urban Indian landscape, these new spaces of consumption attract many middle-class women, who report feeling not just welcomed, but also ardently wooed here. Many women speak of the mall and coffee shop as ‘public spaces’ they regularly access, wherein they feel safe from potholed roads, uneven footpaths and street harassment. Families who will not ‘approve’ of their daughters and wives ‘loitering about’ the street are perfectly content having them do it here.
It is important to emphasise that these new spaces of consumption are not public spaces, but at best privatised spaces that masquerade as public spaces. Some malls, for example, throw in an open space or two as part of their architectural design to mimic the feel of an open town square, with live performances on weekends. In chain coffee shops, the expansive use of glass in the design creates an illusion of both access and transparency, as well as of publicness and privacy. Many women find that attractive, as in their view, it keeps out the ‘danger’ of the street, and yet keeps them in view of it. In our ethnographic studies of coffee shops, we found that women on their own often chose to sit in specific locations, usually at the edges of the shop facing the street, with their back to the wall, or in places where they could clearly view people approaching them.
While many women find pleasure in these spaces of consumption, it’s important to remember that access to them demands a demonstration of their capacity to buy. Not all classes of women access these equally, and those middle-class women who do, have to play the part — not just in what pricey beverage they consume, but also in terms of dress and demeanour in order to legitimise their presence as ‘respectable’ women.
As we reiterate in Why Loiter , access to such pseudo public spaces creates a veneer of access for middle-class women that pre-empts “any substantive critique of the lack of actual access to real public space.” While the modern coffee shop or mall might give individual women a chance to hang out in a limited manner, it doesn’t further in any way a woman’s claim to actual public space, to which they still enjoy only conditional access. In fact, many young upwardly mobile women mention, without any misgiving whatsoever, that the new spaces of consumption — which according to urban planner Tridib Banerjee (2001) create “an illusion of public space from which the risks and uncertainties of everyday life are carefully edited out” — distance them further from real public space, as they see no reason whatsoever to now engage with it. Instead, using modern private transport, they now move effortlessly between the private bubbles of home and office, and home and coffee shop/bar/mall.
The sad result: If you don’t access or engage with real public space, you stop caring about it, and when it shrinks, gets privatised and taken over by unscrupulous developers, there’s no one left to speak up for it.
The writer is a Mumbai-based journalist, researcher and co-author, Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets
