ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how a group of feminist American architects arrived at low-income housing as a form of alternative, experimental practice in the late 1970s. It discusses two interrelated organizations, the Women's School of Planning and Architecture (WSPA), a radical pedagogical project, and the Women's Development Corporation (WDC), a non-profit developer of housing. The chapter describes these organizations in their economic, political, and policy contexts: the end of Fordism, and the resulting funding cuts for social and public services which led to decline in low-income neighborhoods in urban centres, and the rise of community development corporations. The founders of WDC applied the ideological agenda of WSPA directly into practice in the field in Providence. WSPA proposed alternatives to conventional architectural practice. Chad Brown was quite different from the tower blocks that came to characterize public housing projects in the post-war era. The dominant image of public housing in post-war United States has been the high-rise, high-density "project."
