When geographer Leslie Kern first moves to Toronto’s Junction neighborhood, its public spaces are overwhelmingly geared toward male and working-class customers. There are pawn shops and porn shops, cheap donut shops, and greasy diners. A coffee shop, the Nook, establishes a safe place for women to go and “take up space,” with restrooms and a small play area in the back to make women and families with children feel comfortable.

In Feminist City, Kern describes the Nook as the kind of “third place” urbanists celebrate as “an environment (and, of course, a brand) where people can be alone, together.” The porn stores and (non-artisanal) donut shops close, more cafes like the Nook open, and the construction of new condos echoes over pricey strollers gliding down sidewalks.

At first, certain institutions in the Junction neighborhood seem unchanged. The Salvation Army Evangeline Residence, the second-largest women’s center in the city, continues to provide short- to medium-term shelter for up to ninety women. Shelter rules do not allow women to stay in the shelter all day, so they are forced to be in public, where they are “watched constantly” and informally policed by their increasingly affluent neighbors as their “physical appearance, habits, and occasional expressions of mental illness mark them as ‘other.’”