Feminist Next System Literature Review

Leslie Weisman

Leslie Kanes Weisman, former associate dean and founding member of the New Jersey Institute of Technology School of Architecture, is a feminist architect, whose work focuses on describing and challenging the ways that space and the built environment create meaning--”reflecting and reinforcing existing gender, race and class relations...Weisman thus views access to space and its appropriation as political acts, and her research and teaching aim at subverting existing power relations in order to construct fairer cities.” In 1974 she co-founded the Women's School of Planning and Architecture (WSPA). “WSPA was organised as a summer school for women taught entirely by women, in which the content as well as the mode of teaching moved beyond traditional methods.”
-Quotes from: “Spatial Agency: Leslie Kanes Weisman.” http://www.spatialagency.net/database/why/political/weisman.

In Discrimination by Design, Weisman describes the racial, class and gendered power balances involved in building and controlling space. Focusing most specifically on feminist questions she She traces the social and architectural histories of the skyscraper, maternity hospital, , shopping mall, American dream house, and public housing buildings. She raises and examines key questions about gender and the built environment: When and why do women feel unsafe in cities? Why did the 1990’s housing crisis make women more vulnerable than men? And what would change about the built environment (especially homes and communities) if they were designed to create and sustain relationships of class and social equality and environmental justice?

Weisman currently lives in Southold Town in Long Island, where she has been living since 2002 when she retired early and began a political career focused on serving on the zoning board and making planning and design decisions on a day-to-day basis. 

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