City Planning and Modern Feminist Design
Austin proposed using a system of underground tunnels for laundry, a hot meal delivery service, commuters, and for the transportation of supplies and goods. This would result in less domestic housework, easier childcare, less road traffic, and free women from the traditional household duties, which could allow them to fully enter the public sphere, or non domestic world. She also included built-in furniture, roll away beds, and heated tile floors, which would reduce housework such as vacuuming and increase functionality in a limited space.
She also planned to change several things in the traditional domestic sphere. Her introduction of the kitchenless house, supported by the underground tunnel system, was efficient for women because it eliminated long hours of labor preparing meals for the family. A kitchenless house could theoretically promote healthier family interaction and care.
The garden city movement of Ebenezer Howard and the feminist influence of Charlotte Perkins Gilman helped inspire Austin’s designs. In the public sphere, Austin chose to promote safety and affordability, as illustrated through her plans for public parks and low-income homes for women in need (either due to abuse, divorce, etc.). In the private sphere, she designed for comfort, efficiency, functionality, and collective domestic housework, which would reduce domestic labor in the home.
Read more about this topic: Alice Constance Austin
Famous quotes containing the words city, planning, modern, feminist and/or design:
“I come from the city of Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,”
—John Collins Bossidy (1860–1928)
“Play for young children is not recreation activity,... It is not leisure-time activity nor escape activity.... Play is thinking time for young children. It is language time. Problem-solving time. It is memory time, planning time, investigating time. It is organization-of-ideas time, when the young child uses his mind and body and his social skills and all his powers in response to the stimuli he has met.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods.... Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“... the Black woman in America can justly be described as a “slave of a slave.””
—Frances Beale, African American feminist and civil rights activist. The Black Woman, ch. 14 (1970)
“For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)