How was women’s access to the street shaped in global cities of the past? This paper tackles this important question for an era in which it is assumed that women’s access to and contact with the streets was suddenly and drastically limited: the so-called early modern period. This period is seen as the major transitionary phase in the transformation to modern societies, where capitalism, industrialisation and globalisation first emerged.

The paper summarizes the main findings of the Freedom of the Streets research project in which an interdisciplinary team studied gendered street use in four major cities: Amsterdam, Edo (now Tokyo), Berlin and Batavia (now Jakarta). It assesses the role of ideology, urban planning, technical innovations (housing and vehicles), as well as the changing economies. It pays specific attention to everyday practices to reveal power dynamics and contestations between different urban groups in claiming the streets, as well as to different types of streets and open urban spaces to showcase the diversity of urban experience and how this diversity came about. By taking a long-term and comparative perspective it aims to unpick the complex dynamics of gendered street use and as such provide insights into how streets are claimed across time and space.