Home, Sweet Home: How the Single Family House Became America’s Favorite

Monday, March 4, 2019

12:00 PM-2:00 PM

Please join us for the final winter installment of Power, Pleasure and Space: Planning the 21st City, a speaker series brought to you by the Urban Sociologists of the Department of Sociology, Drexel University.

Sonia Hirt, Dean and Hughes Professor in Landscape Architecture and Planning, University of Georgia, will be joining us to present "Home, Sweet Home: How the Single Family House Became America's Favorite."

The private, detached single-family house has long been a dominant feature in the cities, towns, and suburbs of the United States to a much greater extent than in most other Western nations. To this very day, the private home is considered a constitutive element of the “American Dream.”  This presentation seeks to uncover some of the mechanisms through which this house acquired commanding presence in the American imagination and, consequently, in American metropolitan space. Specifically, turning to professional discourses from the early 1900s.

This presentation will argue that city-building experts from that time period – architects, housing reformers, sociologists, lawyers and urban planners – collectively envisioned the detached single-family house as having a privileged claim to the American city and converted this vision into a persuasive story. Through their storytelling, the experts helped craft a number of government strategies that defended the dominant position of the single-family dwelling in the American city through the remainder of the twentieth century.

This event is free and open to the public, lunch will be included.

About Sonia Hirt

Professor Hirt is the Dean and Hughes Professor in Landscape Architecture and Planning at the University of Georgia. Initially trained as an architect in her hometown of Sofia (the capital of Bulgaria), Dr. Hirt holds a master's and a doctoral degree in urban and environmental planning from the University of Michigan. She focuses on the interactions between social and cultural values and the urban built environment. Through her scholarship and teaching, she aims to advance understanding of the relationships between social processes, cultural values, and urban forms, and to create opportunities to make cities more equitable, beautiful, and sustainable.

Contact Information

Dorian Adams
215.895.1314
dadams@drexel.edu