Shelter and Development

The importance of a house in enabling individuals and families to attain physical shelter from inclement weather, provide security, a ‘grounded’ attachment to place, and enhance the quality of life of residents is an idea that has universal acceptance. Particularly since the Second World War, it has become an integral part of the popular imagination. The almost iconic status of what a house represents to upwardly mobile, nuclear, families is reflected in the great expansion of industries involved in real estate and housing development. This expansion includes the production for, and growth of, a formalised building and construction industry, and the production of domestic appliances and tools that are deemed essential for attaining a ‘modern’ ‘ideal’ domestic life. The theme popularised by the housing industry, of the virtue of the nuclear ‘modern’ family and the good life enabled to it by appropriately designed and furnished housing and appli­ ances, has been enormously compelling. The meaning of house in the creation of ‘home’ in the post-industrial era has been universally marketed to those able to climb onto the development ladder. These have largely been families who were a part of the growing ‘middle class’ in the industrialised world and more recently in the developing world too. As Hayden (1982, 1984, 2003) has perceptively docu­ mented in her scholarship, the broad embrace of this notion has had great consequences for the composition and morphology of cities worldwide. She traces the impact of these forces in the United States and describes the shrinking sphere of influence it imposes on women in nuclear families who are relegated to play out their primary role in domesticity, maintaining a home and family. She describes the efforts of early feminists in the United States who experimented with alternatives that offered women relief from the domestic burden. In her follow-up books, she articulates a need to redefine the housing ideal from the suburban, nuclear, one-wage­ earner family prototype and postulates how to approach a ‘redesign’ of the American Dream. Clearly apparent in various cultures throughout the First and the Third Worlds is a fragmentation of the prevailing traditional family type. In the First World, in countries such as the United States, single-women-headed households have become one of the fastest growing segments of the popu­ lation. But in the face of these shifts, the physical contours of housing, the legal, social, and architectural approaches to housing creation, and the planning and zoning approaches that have shaped land use in cities have chan­ ged very little. They continue to adhere to the notion that the primary target group for provision of housing is a nuclear, one-wage-earner family with stay-at-home mother and dependent children. The sprawl of cities as this type of housing is built on inexpensive land in suburban developments is addressed by Hayden. This, and other similar work, makes clear the need for housing that is enabling of nonnuclear types of families. It also highlights the need to design housing that allows women a balance between the domestic and public domains and a more rational, energy-conserving urban development and city form.