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In the post-industrial American city, consumption and women play new and crucial roles. As service, tourist, shopping, and entertainment industries take prominence over or supplement the more explicitly male industrial and financial industries, women entrepreneurs have become significant actors in the city (Benson, 1988; Green, 1997). Femininity overlaps with bourgeois values in gentrification, giving women's actions a special import (Jackson & Thrift, 1995). The ‘ladies’ of gentrification produce new interpersonal dynamics on the streets and sidewalks, helping to facilitate neighborhood change, spread safety and stimulate new community ties.¹ This analysis is based on a multi-year field study and extended interviews of the neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn in New York City. In the past decade, this ethnic working-class neighborhood's primarily male industrial landscape and female domestic sphere has been supplanted by new mixed-gender, quasi-public spaces. Drawing on Jane Jacobs’ concepts of “eyes on the street” and “public characters” (Jacobs, 1961), I characterize women entrepreneurs as “faces on the street” who serve a key role in the transformation of neighborhood streets. This study focuses on the role of women in the gentrification process as an attempt to address the broader issue of the role of women in urban studies (DeSena, 2000; Leavitt, 2003).

In the United States, the 1960s and 1970s are characterized as a period of social revolutions. The dictates of social institutions and expectations of everyday life were scrutinized and questioned. The young and not so young mobilized and protested for civil rights, students’ rights, women's rights, against the war in Vietnam and for improvements in city neighborhoods. These movements themselves and the social order they ultimately created were organized, analyzed, debated, and theorized within universities, thus serving as an impetus for change within the academy. One major change was the development of departments devoted to black studies, ethnic studies, and women's studies. Scholarship dealing with minority groups was thereby legitimized. This trend continues with the addition of gay, lesbian, and queer studies.

The use and appropriation of public spaces is one of the fundamental aspects to be taken into account in research on the daily lives of the men and women who live in cities. This experience is not the same for everybody since factors such as sex, age, social class and ethnic and cultural identity affect the way in which urban life is experienced and perceived. We define public spaces as places of interrelation, social encounter and exchange, where groups with different interests converge (Borja & Muxí, 2001). Where they are used by a great diversity of people and for a wide variety of activities, public spaces can contribute to the collective identity of the community (Valle, 1997; Franck & Paxson, 1989). They have the capacity to become “participatory landscapes”, core elements in urban life that reflect our culture, beliefs and values (Francis, 1989).

Post-war Italy faced a transition from industrial reconstruction to a phase of mature capitalism characterised by massive internal migrations towards the north of the country. A rapid urbanisation process created large dysfunctional areas at the periphery of the main re-industrialising cities like Milan, Genoa and Turin. In particular Milan has been defined as the capital of the Italian economic miracle (Foot, 2001). But during the 1950s Milan's extended industrial areas were subjected to main socio-spatial transformations: from being a mix of industrial and rural communities just after the war, the peripheries of Milan turned into deprived areas lacking basic services and infrastructure during the 1970s, when social conflicts were increasingly rising. From 1968 to 1977 Milan was also one of the main stages of a cultural revolution that in Italy uniquely assumed deep political implications by undermining the fundamental institutions of the state (Balestrini & Moroni, 1988).