Gendered, Material, and Partial Knowledges: A Feminist Critique of Neighborhood-Level Indicator Systems

As researchers and community-based organizations increasingly move toward a more ‘holistic approach’ to addressing urban problems, the use of neighborhood-level social indicator systems as a tool to inform resident activism is becoming common practice. In this paper, I use a feminist theoretical framework to critically assess the epistemology and methodology of current practices in the use and development of neighborhood-level indicator systems. Using the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership as a framework, I critique the practices of using quantitative, spatial statistics to ‘democratize information’ within the feminist theoretical debates surrounding the production of knowledge, the use of quantitative methods, difference across gender, essentialism versus antiessentialism, and the discursive production of gender. In so doing, I demonstrate the importance of a feminist theoretical and practical perspective in informing the future development of urban neighborhood-level indicator systems.