Producing the City through Feminist Deliberation: Urban Governance and Spatial Justice at the Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan (2021-2027)

Supervisor/s: Rosa Monteiro

Doctoral Programme: Cities and Urban Cultures

Funding: Gobierno de México

Over the past few years feminist movements in Mexico City have become pivotal actors in reshaping contemporary urban life, transforming not only the ways in which public space is occupied, but also how it is contested, produced, and politically imagined. Beyond protest and mobilization, these movements engage in alternative forms of urban action that challenge dominant narratives of the city and reconfigure public space as a site of political struggle, symbolic meaning-making, and territorial claim-making. In doing so, urban feminisms have emerged as critical agents in the creation of new forms of situated spatial justice.

Starting from the premise that feminist movements do not simply inhabit urban space but actively participate in its political and symbolic production, this doctoral research develops a qualitative case study employing an interpretive ethnographic approach, focusing on the feminist re-signification of the former Columbus Roundabout, now known as the Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan (The Roundabout of the Women Who Fight).

The project analyzes how feminist deliberative practices enacted by the Frente Amplio de Mujeres que Luchan reshape forms of urban governance and articulate claims for spatial justice through the transformation of the Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan between 2021 and 2027.

Grounded in feminist epistemologies and critical urban sociology, this research combines documentary analysis, qualitative case study with an ethnographic approach, and inductive theoretical development to examine the organizational, deliberative, and spatial dynamics through which the movement produces alternative forms of urban politics.

Ultimately, this study seeks to contribute to the development of a situated Latin American feminist urban sociology by offering analytical tools to understand how urban feminist movements transform the meanings and uses of public space, generate new forms of democratic participation from non-institutional settings, and challenge established models of urban governance.