Feminist Visions for City Design
We live in an age of asymmetric access. Navigation in the city, defined here as a metropolitan area that includes the city center and suburban residential areas, can present barriers—some that are temporary inconveniences, such as road closures or train delays, and others made only more difficult by their lack of visibility or acknowledgement by those unaffected.
No matter how abstract these constraints may seem, they are embedded into the built environment—the manmade surroundings that provide the setting for human activity. The spatial is social. Sebastian Moffat and Niklaus Kohler argue that it is more appropriate to define “the built environment not as an object but as social-ecological system.” Such arguments and more recent shifts in architecture and city-planning highlight a push to acknowledge the social dimension of space.
This social dimension includes assumptions about gender. In their research on developing a gender-equal city in Umeå, Sweden, Lina Sandberg and Malin Rönnblom argue that through its spatial layout, its architecture, and the social relations that play out in the space, “the city produces and reproduces the structures of power in society.” The boundaries we encounter in the city are very often the consequence of yesterday’s spatial planning that has systematically overlooked marginalized communities. A first step in promoting a more equitable landscape is to analyze historically how assumptions about gender and the home have been physically manifested in the built environment.
In the 1860s, a group of American feminists, led by Melusina Fay Peirce, Mary Livermore, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, campaigned against women’s confinement to the home, arguing that a woman could not be an equal member of society if she spent her days solely on domestic chores. In her 1981 book The Grand Domestic Revolution, Dolores Hayden titled these women “material feminists.” Working parallel to the fight for universal suffrage, material feminists focused on the material conditions women found themselves in and identified the economic exploitation of their domestic labor by men as the fundamental cause of inequality. These women sought to change both social and physical structures, calling for a transformation in American homes, neighborhoods, and cities.
“The single-family home meant the work women did in the home became increasingly invisible, observable to the private family life but hidden from public view.”
Material feminists crucially recognized that the built environment should be better suited to the needs of women. Such envisions included kitchen-free apartments and communal facilities where housework and childcare would be organized collectively and performed by paid workers. Peirce argued that unpaid and unstimulating housework oppresses women economically as well as intellectually. In 1868 in The Atlantic Monthly, she proposed an alternative model she termed “cooperative housekeeping.” To put her ideas into practice, she founded the Cambridge Cooperative Housekeeping Association in Massachusetts in 1869. The cooperative was short-lived, however, closing 1871.
Part of the decline of the cooperative and material feminism in general stemmed from a level of elitism. Put forward by white middle-class women and aimed to help the very same demographics, the solutions relied on the work of poor women, often Black women, women of color, or immigrant women, whose own families and daily struggles were never put into consideration. Affluent women would assume the role of managers and gain more leisure time, and poorer women would become the workers performing the tasks at hand. The neglect of race and class issues combined with a string of external factors such as widespread red-baiting contributed to the movement’s downturn during the 1920s.
Homeownership played a role in gendering the urban landscape and its suburban offshoots. In the U.S., new home construction had been stalled due to the country’s involvement in World War 1. When the war ended, the U.S. was left with a significant home shortage. In 1921, newly named Secretary of Commerce Hebert Hoover created the Division of Construction and Housing. Coupled with the “Better Homes in America” campaign, these efforts signified a governmental push to connect home, family, and country. Years, later in 1931 at the White House Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership, Hoover laid out this mindset more overtly, stating “adequate housing goes to the very roots of well-being of the family, and the family is the social unity of the Nation” The following Hoover Commission Report on home Building and Home Ownership specifically encouraged single-family homes, effectively ending material feminist efforts towards household cooperatives. Corporations had an immediate economic interest in supporting individual homeownership as more households meant higher purchases—each family in their single home needed their own car, their own vacuum cleaner, and their own toaster, along with other items and appliances they would not be sharing with anyone else, which in turn brought more profit.
The onset of the Depression changed the landscape of homeownership as housing foreclosures skyrocketed, but presumptions about the home as it connected to a woman’s supposed place, work, and worth had seeded. The single-family home meant the work women did in the home became increasingly invisible, observable to the private family life but hidden from public view. Hayden notes that, even for married women who held certain occupations that were available to them at the time, this setup posed a problem. Instead of coming home after work to rest and pursue their leisure interests as their husbands did, employed women came back to their second job at home: A woman’s work was never done.
A burgeoning advertising industry further propped up the ideal of a single-family living in their private house. “Women were offered a new vision of comfort and family life,” writes scholar and author Elizabeth Wilson in her book The Sphinx in the City, “yet were increasingly imprisoned in the genteel interior.”
In tandem with homeownership, automobiles had a major influence on the layout of cities. With the advent of private motorized vehicles—automobile registration in the U.S. surged from 6.7 million in 1919 to over 23 million a decade later—the organization of cities underwent drastic changes, and new roads were designed to ensure men in their cars can commute in a fast and efficient manner. Historian Margaret Walsh notes that women, too, enjoyed the newly gained mobility and sometimes drove the family car, but “men continued to consider that they should be granted priority because they were the wage-owners and the head of the household...”
“The model of a nuclear family settled in a private home and dependent on one or more cars continues to prevail, even though it seems unsustainable in the face of the housing crisis, environmental crisis, and social change.”
The grand scheme architects of the 20thh century, prominently Robert Moses in New York and Rudolf Hillebrecht in post-war Germany, shared the vision of the fast-paced metropolis of the future and designed cities for cars, thereby, neglecting the day-to-day needs of the urban populace who did not own an automobile. Moses’s megalomaniac projects “were designed to make every person in New York not only subservient to the automobile but dependent on it” and consumed financial resources that were then lacking elsewhere, including the public transport system. Hundreds of thousands of NYC residents were displaced after expressways ran through their old neighborhoods. In Hannover, despite protests, at least two historical buildings that survived the war were torn down to make way for cars.
The model of a nuclear family settled in a private home and dependent on one or more cars continues to prevail, even though it seems unsustainable in the face of the housing crisis, environmental crisis, and social change. In precarious working conditions of short-term contracts and the exploitative gig economy, homeownership is often not even up for consideration among younger generations. Many people face the prospect of renting for life while skyrocketing rent prices and gentrification push long-term residents out of their neighborhoods. Natural catastrophes already have and will continue to displace people across the globe, creating further need for sustainable housing solutions.
Elizabeth Wilson wrote, “We need a radically different approach to the city. We will never solve the problems of living in cities until we welcome and maximize the freedom and autonomy they offer and make these available to all classes and groups.” As we face the intimidating necessity of major structural changes, understanding the historical roots of such inequalities sheds light on barriers in the built environment that are not always obvious. Exposing the power hierarchies—both their history and physical manifestations—is the first step in dismantling them and moving beyond a gendered landscape.
Further Reading
Dolores Hayden, “What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like? Speculations on Housing, Urban Design, and Human Work,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5, no. 3 (1980): 170–87.
Image credit: City skyline by Khairul Nizam (Flickr | CC BY 2.0)
