Disintegrated Houses: Exploring
Ecofeminist Housing and Urban
Design Options
Louise Crabtree
Department of Human Geography, Macquarie University, NSW, Australia;
lcrabtre@els.mq.edu.au
Sherilyn MacGregor astutely highlights possible points of tension between the socioeconomic
agendas, processes and outcomes of ecocity and feminist urban visions. MacGregor also claims
ecofeminism may benefit from utilising the language of citizenship to move beyond essentialised
gender and spatial associations of care to address such possible tensions between ecological and
feminist agendas. Responding to MacGregor’s reflections on options for taking care into the
public realm, and the need in this to question the public–private divide, this paper asks whether
the traits highlighted by Chantal Mouffe’s citizen can be applied to the socioeconomic aspirations
of the ecocity, addressing possible tensions between ecocity and feminist aspirations on the basis
of a de-essentialised ethic of care.
Introduction
This paper seeks to redress possible tensions between ecocity and
feminist design agendas, processes and outcomes. Recent work on self
and home highlights these as embedded, flexible and diverse phenomena
rather than autonomous, hermetically sealed and constant. These traits
can be seen to weave through both ecocity and feminist design.
Ecocity design consciously addresses the embeddedness, flexibility
and diversity of the home. Embeddedness is addressed through the home,
taking responsibility for its physical requirements and being part of the
environment, translating into considerations about onsite energy gener-
ation, water sourcing, water treatment, solid waste treatment and energy
efficiency. Flexibility is the ability to accommodate changes over time
without compromising core functionality. Diversity manifests as multi-
purpose design which can facilitate a range of activities and interpreta-
tions, and in design for a heterogeneity of lifestyles and functions.
Feminist design often echoes these themes of diversity and flexibil-
ity over life changes, addressing in particular activities in the home
traditionally scripted as non-domestic, such as community work, paid
work and political activity. The embeddedness of home in feminist work
C© 2006 Editorial Board of Antipode.
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712 Antipode
is more frequently interpreted socially and/or economically, a base from
which alternative feminist economic visions also build.
Ecological and feminist economic models have often accompanied
ecocity and feminist design manifestos. Models of ecological economics
analogous to ecocity models focus on diversified, localised working
weeks and extension of work to include decentralised, participatory
processes of planning, decision making and management. Feminist
economic discussions trace the modernist separation of public from
private through the economic realm and explore how this can be
redressed (Gardiner 1997; Gibson-Graham 1996; Plumwood 1995).
Such feminist reconceptualisations are often predicated on an ethic
of care, offering this as the basis from which economies should be
rethought. Both ecocity and feminist economic models offer the poten-
tial for acknowledging location of economy throughout the urban form,
rather than assuming or dictating an official location of its existence.
Feminist economics opens up discussions of economies of reciprocity
and sharing, tying social obligation back into the economy on the basis
of an ethic of care.
Thus, in ecocity and feminist design manifestoes, the city is far messier
than allowed by modernist scripting with its impermeable public–private
divide at the home’s threshold. MacGregor (2003) highlights areas where
ecocity and feminist visions may clash, however, arguing that the decen-
tralisation and diversification of “work” called for in ecocity manifestos
may render these activities invisible to the economy, left yet again to
women and vulnerable to exploitation. MacGregor (2004) also raises
concerns regarding possible dangers of ecofeminist visions predicating
feminist endeavour on an ethic of care, as these may essentialise care as a
feminised trait, enabling neoliberal capitalist marginalisation, outsourc-
ing and exploitation, or conversely lead to rampant parochialism and
NIMBYism in the public realm. MacGregor (2004) calls for an ecofem-
inist citizenship to bring care to a radical democratic imaginary, such
that care becomes politicised and responsibility woven throughout the
“public” realm.
Mouffe’s model of citizenship and radical democracy (1995) is pred-
icated upon the embedded, flexible and diverse self, and this offers a
starting point for addressing possible points of tension between these
two visions of ecological and social justice in the city. Core traits
of Mouffe’s postmodern citizen can be used to imagine and propose
supporting structures and processes for the decentralised and integrative
intentions of ecocity visions, addressing the possible sexism of such
visions. Mouffe’s citizenship illuminates the mutual embeddedness and
messiness of self and society. This paper proposes core traits of Mouffe’s
citizenship as a framework for addressing the possible failures of ecoc-
ity visions highlighted by MacGregor and for answering her call for
ecofeminism to embrace citizenship. It utilises Mouffe’s elaborations of
C© 2006 Editorial Board of Antipode.