Author: Diana Lind
Diana Lind’s Brave New Home “is one of those invaluable books that offer a new, revelatory window on familiar problems.” said Liza Featherstone in a review for The New York Times.
“Faced with a host of societal challenges — economic inequality, loneliness, housing precarity, environmental degradation — Lind convincingly argues that the single-family home is at least partly to blame,” Featherstone added.
“This cultural obsession, Lind shows, was manufactured by 20th-century policymakers and real estate developers wanting to populate the suburbs, as well as media-fueled — often racist and elitist — panics over the unwholesomeness of cities for families,” said the review.
Featherstone said Lind “rightly contends that the single-family home is an impossible dream for many, fueling inequality.”
The single-family home also “gives its inhabitants far more space than they require, wastefully encouraging them to acquire unnecessary stuff and use far too much energy on heating, cooling and lighting,” said the review.
Featherstone is the author, most recently, of Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation.
