Abstract

Gender and Resilience in the City is an exploration of one urbanizing city: Bharatpur Nepal, from 2014 to 2019. Bharatpur is representative of countless dynamic cities around the world. Local authorities and residents are learning what it means to be in a city in which the rural and urban are morphing into a new space of living. People’s historical practices are blending with opportunities for new futures, including those offered by international development projects.

Attending to gender (not only women) in policy efforts - and in academically overlooked, small urbanizing cities - is critical to our understanding of global urbanisms and development. The book explores two gendered groups that function on a neighbourhood level: mothers' groups and neighbourhood groups. Mothers’ groups provide invisible community resilience in the form of social infrastructures. They experience slow violence by patriarchal power structures that will not allow them to be more than resilient. Meanwhile, by participating in neighbourhood groups, certain men (particularly high caste and affluent ones) are allowed to rework the urban and fulfil their aspirations for physical infrastructure in the form of paved roads in a new state-grey space controlled by the local authority.

This book presents the experiences of mothers’ groups, neighbourhood groups, governmental officials, and international development projects. It considers who has power, who is kept invisible to whom, and who can create the city in their imagery. New forms of ‘we’ness are being created. The insights in this accessible book will inspire researchers, students, practitioners, and policy makers working with urban community resilience.