Dolores Hayden

Hayden showed that the postwar American suburb was not a neutral answer to housing demand: it was designed around a particular family, with one wage and a housewife, and that decision was built into plot sizes, the separation of uses and dependence on the car.

Her other line of work is the memory of place. She argues that urban heritage almost always preserves the monumental and erases labour, migration and women's lives, and she proposed concrete ways of inscribing those histories into the public space of Los Angeles.

An architectural and urban historian, born in 1945 and professor emerita at Yale University, Hayden pioneered reading the city through a gender lens. Seven American Utopias (1976) studied the utopian communities of the nineteenth century and The Grand Domestic Revolution (1981) recovered the material feminists who between 1870 and 1930 proposed collective kitchens, nurseries and neighbourhoods designed to socialise domestic work, a history planning had forgotten.

Redesigning the American Dream (1984) showed that the single-family suburb was designed around a model of family with a housewife that no longer existed, and The Power of Place (1995) told of her project in Los Angeles to mark in public space the history of women, African Americans and migrants, such as that of Biddy Mason. Building Suburbia (2003) and A Field Guide to Sprawl (2004) complete her work on dispersal. Also a poet, she has shown that urban history decides who is seen in the city.