> Everyday Realities of Home-based Work in Madrid

Matadero, Centre for Contemporary Creation
Madrid, Spain
2011

All homes are working environments. While they have become increasingly considered places of consumption, containing the objects we purchase and serving as settings to spend hours watching TV, they are also crucial spaces for production and reproduction in the city. Today, the productive paid activities that take place in the home are linked to increasingly decentralised modes of production and the technologies that enable them.

In addition, for many social groups, the home plays a key role as a production centre in the development of entrepreneurial projects, or simply in helping people to balance household reproductive and paid, work-related tasks. However, urban planning has largely ignored the problems that arise from these realities – as well as the potential they offer. While home-based work has historically been overlooked when considering care and reproductive realities in the home, it is important to recognise that, at present, there are many other areas where home-based work is also neglected.

In Husos we initiated a research project in 2009 to analyse an array of labour situations within the home environment, in order to understand how changes in housing design can promote social welfare and empowerment by better accommodating home-based productive and reproductive practices. (For a more detailed account of this research, see Barajas and García in Volume Magazine no 32: Centers Adrift, 2012).

In this phase of the project, which focuses on fieldwork in Madrid, we used questionnaires to engage with forty-eight individuals who work from or in the home. In-depth interviews and extended fieldwork were carried out on ten of these individuals. This led to an analysis of two fundamental aspects of the everyday realities of home-based work. The first concern pertains to social capital, specifically how these realities can empower certain individuals and serve as a tool for economic emancipation and the nurturing of entrepreneurial endeavours.

Moreover, they facilitate the development of new types of relationships, such as the integration of productive and reproductive aspects of life, as well as a closer connection to a person’s immediate surroundings.

In contrast, the second aspect is related to certain issues of the opposite nature: the tendency towards round-the-clock working schedules and their frequent relationship to various forms of isolation, labour exploitation and precariousness, whether these occur inside or outside of legality.

The cases studied in this analysis present arguments that show how this particular aspect of precariousness does not necessarily undermine the importance of the values found in domestic (re)productive everyday life and in the current dispersion of work in general.

Instead, they emphasise the importance of developing new frameworks to view housing as a potential space for sharing care, affect and imagination. Such frameworks should be physical (new types of residential buildings, for example), organisational (political-normative, community management and labour laws), and symbolic (providing visibility when needed). Furthermore, they should allow for the collaborative creation of both tangible and intangible goods that are connected to increased participation and democratisation in the production and reproduction of our societies.