Italy's unspoken epidemic: gender violence and the call for intersectional urbanism.
Within an Italy struggling between progress and archaism, the long shadow of patriarchy casts its darkest outlines, revealing a landscape where violence against women is not an exception but an alarming constant. The year 2023 has been stained with a horrendous toll: 118 women killed, mostly within the confines of domestic walls, those places that should be sancta sanctorum of protection and love. This figure is not just a statistic; it's an indictment against a system that continues to foster gender violence as if it were an inevitable legacy of our society.
No less shocking is the report from the Libellula Foundation, which hits us with the cruel truth that half of the women in our country have suffered, in the year 2021 alone, forms of violence, harassment, or discrimination in the workplace. This is the symptom of a much deeper illness, rooted in the very fabric of our institutions and cultures: a pervasive patriarchal culture that marginalizes, subjugates, and abuses.
Faced with this reality, the urgent need for deep reflection on the role of our cities as spaces of perpetuation or, conversely, of breaking these oppressive dynamics emerges. The streets, squares, and public buildings, designed and built in a context of predominantly male thought, often reflect these inequalities, becoming scenarios of exclusion and discrimination rather than inclusion and safety.
Intersectional feminism, with its critical and inclusive approach, offers us a key to deciphering and challenging these dynamics, proposing itself as a beacon in the night to redesign our cities into places of life, safety, and equality for all. It's time to reclaim our cities as spaces of resistance against patriarchy, where every individual, regardless of gender, race, or social class, can feel part of a community.
Intersectional urbanism, therefore, poses both a challenge and an opportunity: recognizing and including the voices of everyone in the design of urban spaces means not only creating more livable cities but also actively promoting a society based on social justice and equality. It's an ethical and political imperative for a left looking towards the future, aware that the fight for equality also passes through the reappropriation and transformation of the spaces we live in.
This is a call to think and act boldly, not to settle for mere superficial adjustments to our urban planning but to embark on a radical path towards the creation of intersectional cities, where every street, every square becomes a theater of liberation rather than oppression. Cities must be the vanguards of profound change, stages where the fight for a more fair and just society materializes in every corner, in every building, in every shared space. The intersectional urban revolution is here, and its victory will mark the dawn of a new civilization, founded on the unyielding principle that every person deserves to live in safety, respect, and dignity.
