Technology and Culture

Technology and Culture 44.4 (2003) 833-835

Dolores Hayden's idea of an architectural paradise is Tynggarden near Copenhagen, Denmark, a cohousing project that balances privacy and community by dedicating a portion of the private space to communal uses. Café and sports facilities, solar-energy-operated centers for laundry, child care, and political meetings, and grass courtyards and playgrounds nicely complement private housing to make up a friendly, spacious, village-like whole of largely wooden buildings, "carrying a complex social program and cultural agenda into a stylistic expression" (p. 181).

According to Hayden, Tynggarden is a successful example of the "neighborhood" strategy, one of three models of housing in industrial societies she describes in Redesigning the American Dream, originally published in 1984 and now reissued in a revised and expanded edition. The others are the "haven" and the "industrial" strategies. The haven strategy, invented in the mid-nineteenth century, aimed at building homes in which each woman would efficiently create "a spiritual and physical shelter" from the hardships of capitalist society (p. 87). The more leftist industrial strategy, in contrast, transferred activities associated with women's domestic sphere—preparing dinner, doing the laundry, raising children—to collective institutions. The neighborhood strategy represented a middle way. While the haven strategy denied women money and social networks, and the industrial strategy negated their traditional skills, the neighborhood strategy proposed to pay women for their traditional skills through cooperatives, the theme of Hayden's Grand Domestic Revolution (1981). The houses associated [End Page 833] with the haven, the industrial, and the neighborhood strategies were, respectively, the single-family suburban house, or "sacred hut"; machine-aesthetic, high-rise mass housing; and low-rise, multifamily dwellings with shared inside and outside spaces.

Hayden claims that all three strategies originally failed to assign any responsibility for housework to men, and that many of the later modifications of these strategies sustained women's double day. In America, the dominance of the haven strategy eventually resulted in a deep housing crisis. The detached single-family home, the American Dream, is too large for many persons living alone, too expensive for young couples to afford, and too difficult for elderly people to maintain. The endless commuting between city and suburb, work and home, and among home, schools, and shops—the toll of the separation between private and public life—is a daily hardship in people's, notably women's, lives. Moreover, home ownership is still far from being equally distributed across white, African-American, and Hispanic households.

Was it a good idea to reissue this book, which received such good press nineteen years ago? Yes, it certainly was. The basic problems Hayden identifies regarding urban planning and housing in America are still relevant. Even worse, the problems summed up for America are more recognizable in Europe now than they were two decades ago, since more women have paid jobs and new suburbs have been built that are often far removed from urban centers. Hayden's impassioned message is crystal clear, her rhetoric strong, and her examples illuminating. The tone is idealistic, aiming at the equality of women and a more caring society. Yet her American and European examples are practical and point to solutions that combine urban planning with policies regarding work, rehabilitation, single-parent families, the elderly, the environment, and safety, now updated with new data, information on recent housing programs, and follow-ups to earlier projects.

The only "but" is that Hayden hardly mentions the difficulty of translating the good housing practices of one country to another. She illuminates the social programs and cultural agendas of many projects, but has far less to say about the cultural contexts of such projects. In Denmark, for instance, public space has a quality unknown elsewhere: it is no coincidence that Tynggarden is located there. Denmark's well-maintained public conveniences, playgrounds, and camp facilities with semipublic rooms stuffed with Nintendo games and other toys...