Selective Permeability, Political Affordances and the Gendering of Cities

Women disproportionately encounter negative affordances in urban environments—defined as features that severely restrict movement and impose harm. City venues are, thus, selectively permeable to women, though men face their own challenges, especially in intersectional contexts. The data in this study suggest that gender combines with ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and visible religious markers, making obstruction a shifting but nonetheless real phenomenon, much like a staircase genuinely impedes wheelchair access. Cultural context also matters: a Black woman may face one set of barriers in Paris, another in Seoul, with a Latin American woman encountering different ones in both. Building on these observations, the article argues that urban landscapes manifest gender-based political affordances—material configurations that reflect and reinforce social inequalities. As an affordance-based framework, the selective permeability model (1) draws on a well-supported theory of perception, where settings objectively present both favorable and hostile values relative to agents. The outlook (2) thereby challenges the stereotype that women’s spatial concerns are merely subjective. The position also (3) affirms that despite differences, people share bodily constraints and, hence, have largely overlapping values and experiences. The perspective accordingly avoids exaggerating divisions to the point of denying the mutual understanding that underlies empathetic norms.