Abstract
Wollstonecraft (1792) believed that power, be it economic, political, or social, is mainly restricted to the public realm. This realm, she argues, is completely appropriated for men. Thus, for her, access to the public realm is vital to the empowerment of women. To reach empowerment, they should bridge these two spheres of private and public in order to exercise the power, ultimately, to reach gender equality. This is what Lakshmi Puri, Deputy Executive Director of UN Women in 2015, commented upon in her speech: “Urban spaces are the most important theaters for the working out of the gender equality and women’s empowerment project”. Urban spaces can serve to break down social barriers, as they can provide women with some much-needed space of their own. In such a space, they might set up a business, for example, or network and interact with other members of the community, furthermore exchange ideas and information, and thus fully participate in community life. In Muslim countries, access to public spaces in cities is highly contested for women due to the nature of everyday life being bound with the private domain according to Islamic law and tradition. These rules culturally direct women into the interior spaces of the home and close neighborhood, and men into the public spaces of the city. Apart from these issues, until now, most of the studies concerning public spaces in Middle-Eastern cities have followed a Western line of interpretation and analysis. Everyday conceptions of the Eastern and Western modes of living relating to private and public spaces however do not make sense in general and especially not in the Kurdish case. The field material of our research project will allow us to scrutinize and critically rehearse these theoretical approaches, which too often are rather limited in empirical material and often endorse a political opinion instead of representing serious, empirically based research. More importantly, not much has been reported on the contribution of public space to the empowerment of women. Furthermore, there is no specific literature dealing with the issue of Kurdish urbanism in in the Middle-Eastern region of Kurdistan in general. Neither is women’s public space in this region treated in particular, especially regarding its socio-spatial implications for women’s everyday lives. This is especially important if we consider Kurdish women’s interaction in public space in a cross-border comparative study in different urban contexts. Women can narrate different kinds of engagement, the challenges they are confronted with, and the strategies they have gained to overcome gender inequality leading to their self-empowerment in social life. Considering this, the present paper aims to investigate the following questions: a) What are the modes and extent of women’s interactions with key public spaces and what are the differences between the case-study cities in this relation? b) How does their personal situation (being alone, married, or having small children) and other variables such as age, level of education, working status, and individual religiosity affect these interactions? c) To what extent do these interactions with public spaces affect women’s empowerment in their social life? In line with these questions, Kurdish women in the four cities of Sanandaj in Iran, Sulaimani in Iraqi Kurdistan, Vienna and Cologne in Europe are the target groups of this research. The starting hypothesis of this research is that Kurdish women in European cities can demonstrate more active engagement and interactions with public spaces than Kurdish women in Kurdistan region, mainly due to the variation in socio-spatial structure, diverging gender role models, and the political framework of their local and national context.
