Women, Neighbourhoods and Everyday Life Dina Vaiou and Rouli Lykogianni [Paper first received, September 2004; in final form, May 2005] Summary. The paper discusses everyday life in urban neighbourhoods from a feminist perspective. It aims to engage theoretically and through reference to research in progress with everyday life as a concept which brings to the foreground of enquiry the richness and variety of everyday experience and helps to approach urban life and urban development as ‘peopled and gendered’ processes. Everyday life is connected to places where women and men live, work, consume, relate to others, forge identities, cope with or challenge routine, habit and established codes of conduct—i.e. neighbourhoods, understood as one important urban spatiality, among many. In the context of geographical debate on space/place, the paper approaches neighbourhoods not as bounded places (although this is not absent from the urban experience), but rather as particular constellations of social relations, with local and supralocal determinants, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus. In such constellations of relations, the intersecting patterns of everyday life of different women determine individual and collective identities and contribute to develop strategies which organise the everyday both as adaptation and recurrent small decisions and as particular practices and general priorities. In turn, adaptations and challenges are determined by urban spatialities and temporalities. Cities are an important component as well as a locus of the sweeping changes implied in the term globalisation, which is often portrayed as a more or less unique path in political as well as in scientific debates. Increasing mobi- lity of financial capital, cultural products and people, global location strategies of multina- tional corporations, intensifying competition among places, social and geographical polar- isation at different geographical scales, are some of the material changes invoked in this context (Brenner and Theodore, 2002). Apart from these, however, globalisation is also a way of constructing a world-view, a discourse which is articulated around a global – local dichotomy, in which a latent scalar hierarchy prioritises the global. In the contradictory and contested process of construction of scale, ‘the urban’ occupies a key position. Cities are seen as nodes, on the one hand in global economic flows and on the other in the regulatory networks of state power. In the context of rescaling of economy and governance, cities are seen as sites of polarisation, segmentation and differ- entiation, but also of important political struggles (Smith, 1996; Swyngedouw and Baeten, 2001). What is missing from these conceptions of spatial scales as continuous and nested, however, is attention to spatial scales ‘below’ the level of the urban (such as the body, home, community, neighbourhood) (see, for example, Lefebvre, 1991). In this paper, our aim is to go beyond a dichotomous conception, focusing on the different spatial scales at which the dynamics and diversities of urban life and urban development are constituted (Swyngedouw, Urban Studies, Vol. 43, No. 4, 731–743, April 2006 Dina Vaiou and Rouli Lykogianni are in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, National Technical University of Athens, 42 Patission Street, 106 82 Athens, Greece. Fax: þ30 210 7723819. E-mail: divaiou@central.ntua.gr and dikelis@hotmail.com. 0042-0980 Print=1360-063X Online=06=040731 – 13 # 2006 The Editors of Urban Studies DOI: 10.1080=00420980600597434