Gender and Resilience in the City is a Top Trending book for 2024

Dr Hanna Ruszczyk, Post Doctoral Research Associate at the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience (IHRR) at Durham University, published her book in 2023. Now Gender and Resilience in the City is one of Practical Action Publishing’s top 5 trending books for 2024. 

The book 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.

This book is based on Dr Ruszczyk's ethnographic and longitudinal study of Bharatpur Nepal from 2014 to 2019. It 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.

You can keep up to date with Dr Ruszczyk on her personal website.

Photo credit: Ruszczyk, H 2024