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 don’t wanna live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light.
Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical developments had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“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 great British Library—an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read: one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or “pure English, undefiled” wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought.”
—Washington Irving (1783–1859)
“All of women’s aspirations—whether for education, work, or any form of self-determination—ultimately rest on their ability to decide whether and when to bear children. For this reason, reproductive freedom has always been the most popular item in each of the successive feminist agendas—and the most heavily assaulted target of each backlash.”
—Susan Faludi (20th century)
“What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)