Home Planning and Gender in Mandatory Palestine

Summary

In this article, Sigal Davidi explores the question of how the Jewish community in Palestine responded to the idea of the “new woman” before the creation of the state of Israel, Sigel largely traces the architect Lotte Cohn’s career in Palestine and her theory which advocated for designs that responded the needs of women. During this period of the 1920’s there was a broader debate in the European architecture community (especially Germany) that sought to redesign the kitchen and domestic spaces for women. This re-examination was largely a response to housewives being dissatisfied with their work and role. This new move to redesign the kitchen and the domestic side of the house pulled from modern ideas of functionalism and adopting a “scientific method” to make cooking and other domestic work as efficient as possible. This is exemplified in the popular “Frankfurt kitchen” Which is a small compact and efficient layout. Notably this design was pushed largely by men as women were the extreme minority in the industry and heavily excluded from the discourse. Throughout her experience in residential design in Palestine Cohn argued for a kitchen that was based more on the lived experiences of women instead of some prescriptive concept detached from experience. Some features included a larger kitchen with a dining room table to help make the kitchen more social. Notably, her ideas weren’t adopted reflecting the discrimination and strongly gendered roles that dominated that period. This article illustrates both the prescriptive ideals of modernism on the domestic household and the large gender imbalance both in the industry and in the discourse and in society more generally.

 

–      The design of the kitchen drastically impacted the experience of women and the architectural designs of the kitchen reinforced gender-inequalities and the traditional role of the housewife.

–      Designing for the right audience or group by listening to them is critical.

–      Architecture can enforce societal roles and how you design a space affects to a degree how people interact and work in that space, their mood, etc.

–      To what extend does architectural design reinforce cultural norms and functional roles?

–      To what extent does architecture reflect cultural ideals in design vs cause its continued propagation?

 

Incompletion

Summary

In this article, Arindam Dutta explores the 1960s trend of large-scale city planning under Dirigisme or the command economy and the shortcomings of these projects that all ultimately were abandoned and incomplete. He does so through two case studies: Toulouse in France and Calcutta project in India. Both case studies constituted different circumstances, cultures and situations yet both ended in failure and incompletion. Dutta explains ultimately that the central reason that these large projects failed was their scale and the complexity of different parties involved. In normal architectural and design plans the architects’ forms diagrams centered around space, but under these large projects and command economics, these projects introduced economists, demographers, and other specialists to create a masterplan into the future This added level of temporal design and planning inherently is flawed in that we can’t predict the future on such a complex scale. The economic side was a central one with Keynesian and Bretton wood theory playing a large role – these projects thought they could plan out the levels of development on the special, and economic level into the future which proved too difficult. Dutta then explains the overall taxonomy of the large city building projects: Conflating plans and diagrams, Bigness, Organicism, Brutalism and Primacies as the central style.

 

The Right to the City

Summary

In the Right to the city, David Harvey argues that there is an inextricable link between capitalism and the development of urban spaces. More specifically, he argues that surpluses capital is deployed towards urbanization projects that work effectively as a reinvestment which can manifest in housing complexes or in consumer institutions/culture. This re-investment is a key part of the capitalist cycle that Harvey describes. Harvey argues that under capitalism there is a strong incentive or necessity to reinvest surplus capital to grow future wealth and ensure future financial security. Because of this general impulse, governments and the upper economic class that control of large amounts of capital re-invest in projects that support a form urbanization deeply rooted in Boston’s returns through, consumerism, housing projects, and spectacles that draw tourists. Harvey Uses the example of the redevelopment of Paris by Haussmann and then the Development of New York City by Moses. Harvey argues that the power to shape the urban space has been largely controlled by the political and economic elite; and that as a result, there is large scale poverty and inequality. While Harvey doesn’t propose any explicit solutions he says that there hasn’t been a large scale movement against the accumulation of land capital in the hands of the political and economic elite; he suggests doing so could make a change similar to the civil rights movement in the US in the 1960s. He also suggests that giving the decision making power of how to deploy surplus’s capital should be in the hand of the state and a political decision.

 

Critical Response

In response to Harveys proposals, I have some concerns and critiques. For one, while the sentiment of uniting the non economic and political elite in a large movement, even if feasible has an ask on a very different scale than the civil rights movement and the objective more ambiguous. More importantly, throughout history we can see examples of how giving the state the power of land development and decisions over its allocation and use can lead to just an horrid if not more horrid conditions. Transferring power of land development to the state while theoretically more just under a representative democracy is still allocating power to another small group.

 

Take Aways

–      Haussmann’s plan for Paris was a large inspiration for New York’s Development

–      Large Cities and urban spaces are deeply rooted in capitalist incentive structures

–      The majority of the