Hayden, Dolores. Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life. New York: W.W. Norton, 1984.
In Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work and Family Life, Dolores Hayden, a professor at the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at UCLA, argues that average wage earners continue to desire a private suburban house--miles from work, day care and other forms of public life--even if it no longer suits their needs. In her words, "the dream house is a uniquely American form, because for the first time in history a civilization has created a utopian idea based on the house rather than the city or the nation." The purpose of her book is to endorse the quest for more agreeable patterns of housing, work, and family life in the United States. In Redesigning the American Dream, Hayden illustrates why the suburban home no longer suits the needs of today's family. She presents this argument in a series of three major sections. The first part focuses on the challneges to the suburban home ideal posed by environmental groups, women's organizations, and by civil rights groups. The second section seeks to identify the desires associated with the idea of home. The third section attempts to identify solutions in the planning of better housing and public space. [J. Bixler]