Support for gender equality has increased globally, and studies of this trend usually examine individual- and/or country-level factors. However, this overlooks subnational variation. City-dwellers are more likely to support gender equality in education, employment, leadership, and leisure. This article investigates the causes of rural–urban differences through comparative, qualitative research in Cambodia. The emergence of rural garment factories presents a quasi-natural experiment to test the theory that female employment enhances support for gender equality. Rural female employment may diminish rural–urban differences in (...) gender inequalities or there may be other important aspects of city-living that amplify support for gender equality. Drawing on Cambodian fieldwork, I suggest that cities raise the opportunity costs of the male breadwinner model, increase exposure to women in socially valued roles, and provide more associational avenues to collectively contest established practices. Interests, exposure, and association reinforce a snowballing process of social change. By investigating the causes of subnational variation, I advance a new theory of growing support for gender equality. (shrink)

This article provides a framework by way of introduction to the special section, ‘The Urban Problematic II’. It introduces a new selection of papers contributing to the continuing project of interrogating concepts, processes and practices associated with contemporary forms of urban life. The article focuses in particular on the problem of infrastructure in relation to questions of urban politics and especially remarks on the emergence of a kind of thinking in which the separation of notions of material infrastructure from those (...) of the social or cultural sphere can no longer be usefully maintained. The essays in the section cumulatively address the issue of an emergent hybridity of urban elements: the virtual and the material, the social and the technical, the political and the instrumental, the vertical and the horizontal. The spectacle of contemporary political activism and dissent emerges in the transformation of social and urban space. (shrink)

This article reflects upon the monopoly and repertoires of violence in the city of Cairo perpetrated in counter-revolutionary moments by the successive military and Islamist regimes, which lack alternative visions and imaginaries. It counters the myth that the Egyptian revolution was non-violent. It also reflects upon some of the debates about the Arab revolutions, the question of militarization, and the return of ‘order’ with the re-emergence of the army in public life. It also reflects upon the multiplication of segregating walls, (...) first as buffer zones to isolate protesters, then as the walls of the gated communities and compounds of the rich, examining the extent to which the supposed revitalization of downtown Cairo actually represents the flight of wealth and capital to isolated areas far from the city center. (shrink)