The WAU 2025 Congress (Antigua, Guatemala) webpage and call for panels are now open - Please visit waucongress2025.org for more info.

WORLD ANTHROPOLOGICAL UNION

CONGRESS 2024​

Paper

"What if the city could-be also ours?": The right that girls have to walk, enjoy and live in the city, their urban experiences and their resistance strategies to claim their place

presenters

    Natalia Pineda Quintero

    Nationality: Colombia

    Residence: España

    University of Basque Country

    Presence:Online

To propose an analysis of the city, and specifically of the street, understood as a space of meeting in which life takes place, it is necessary to recognize that the city itself is crossed by contradictions and barriers, as Teresa del Valle (1997) proposes "the city is mainly the place of everyday life, where everyday life is lived in relation to work, leisure, violence, sex, relationships, love" (p.15); therefore, the experiences related to the city are differentiated according to gender, age, abilities, ethnic-racial belonging and social class, that is why the right to the city has to be read based on the aspects that, when are intertwined, turn out to be particularities in people's lives, and even more so in girls. Thus, a first step to thinking about the right to the city is precisely to walk in it with the conviction that it also belongs to you, it is to know that you are the owner of the enjoyment that comes with feeling safe. It is to meet your friends and occupy a park or a street to play. For this reason, walking ethnography can be a tool to materialize the joys and discomforts that come with reclaiming a place in the world, being an ally of academic and social processes that recognize childhoods as important actors within the social fabric. In that sense, this paper aims to present the urban experiences and resistance strategies built by black girls from the Distrito de Aguablanca in Cali (Colombia), with actions apparently small as walking in their city to make a crack in the wall of adult-centric, racist and sexist mandates that silence their voices.

Keywords:

Right to the city, Childhood, Feminism, Anthropology of childhood, Geography of childhood