Dolores Hayden

Dolores Hayden's great glossary of sprawl uses aerial photographs by Jim Wark to further describe the American suburban phenomenon. Many of the terms are humorous, though not in the sense that sprawl is funny — in the way some expressions are latched on to some pretty absurd ways we use the land. There's the familiar "duck," "drive-through," and "strip," but also "ball pork" (a stadium built with public funds for a privately owned ball team), "litter on a stick" (billboards), and "ozoner" show more (drive-in movie theater). By using these and other terms (be it by creating new terms or using existing ones), Hayden makes the various components and results of sprawl memorable. Like Alex S. MacLean, seeing the landscape of America's (sub)urbanism from the air is one of the best ways to convey the scale of destruction and monotony that this country will have to face up to and remedy one of these days. show less

This history of a little-known intellectual tradition challenging patriarchal notions of "women's place" and "women's work" offers a new interpretation of the history of American feminism and a new interpretation of the history of American housing and urban design. Hayden shows how the material feminists' political ideology led them to design physical space to create housewives' cooperatives, kitchenless houses, day-care centers, public kitchens, and community dining halls. In their show more insistence that women be paid for domestic labor, the material feminists won the support of many suffragists and of novelists such as Edward Bellamy and William Dean Howells, who helped popularize their cause. Ebenezer Howard, Rudolph Schindler, and Lewis Mumford were among the many progressive architects and planners who promoted the reorganization of housing and neighborhoods around the needs of employed women. In reevaluating these early feminist plans for the environmental and economic transformation of American society and in recording the vigorous and many-sided arguments that evolved around the issues they raised, Hayden brings to light basic economic and spacial contradictions which outdated forms of housing and inadequate community services still create for American women and for their families. - from the publisher show less

This books was both fun to look through and educative to read. Through the use of aerial photographs, it shows how the landscape in the United States has been changed through sprawl. Each photograph has a theme, such as privatopia, starter castle, logo building, car glut and the text amplifies the picture. This is well worth a read for any person interested in urban or regional planning.

In her book The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History Dolores Hayden looks at public history in general and specifically at the public history projects done by her organization, The Power of Place, in Los Angeles. As she points out in the first section the vast majority of public history displays in the United States were built to commemorate the white, male politicians and generals who “built” the nation. Hayden argues that we need to create public history displays that show more remember the people, the butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, tinkers, and tailors male and female and of every color who, in reality, built the nation. Preservation efforts, another focus of public history, have primarily targeted mansions and architecturally unique buildings at the expense of buildings that were found everywhere and housed the vast majority of citizens and their workplaces.

To broaden our public memory Hayden and her group worked on a variety of projects. They attempted to acquire historical designation for an early Japanese flower market, worked on turning an abandoned firehouse into a museum, and they built and installed public displays remembering the contributions of individuals and communities. Not all their projects were successful. The market’s owners refused to cooperate fearing economic loss. The firehouse burned before the project was completed. Even the failed projects required a wide array of talents.

Hayden discusses all of the people whose skills are needed on these projects and the book is amply illustrated with images of successful projects. Her accounts of the successes as well the failures make this book a required read for anyone contemplating a public history project. She provides a wealth of ideas and strategies to aid in creating a project and bringing it to completion. The best lines in the book are quotes she has chosen to illustrate a point but her writing is very straightforward and readable. I recommend this book to anyone interested in museums and public history, because I first learned about this book from a reading list in the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Public History graduate program I am confident that I am not the only one who thinks well of it. show less