The productive home. Towards a new domestic environment with immaterial work

Abstract

The dwelling always held work activities. However, with the emergence of capital, work spread more and more in the city, abandoning the dwelling due to new dynamics of mass production and accumulation that were no longer suited to the small scale of the house. It resulted in a gradual rethinking of domestic spaces, leading to the definition of the established duality of home/work. Instead, the digital revolution and the advent of capital’s ‘immaterial work’ in western countries placed the domestic space as the potential epicentre of capitalist production. Immaterial work is not bound by spatial constraints and can therefore be carried out anywhere, even and especially at home. The insertion of production dynamics within the domestic sphere is generating numerous spatial-temporal conflicts of traditional places and functions, leading to new everyday life and new spatial needs. The paper therefore analyses the changing dynamics of the home and its spatial possibilities emerging from the potential merge of immaterial productivity with domesticity.

Keywords:

• Domesticity
• immaterial labour
• digital labour
• productive house
• late capitalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Flavio Martella

Flavio Martella, a PhD student in architectural communication of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, has a degree in building engineering and architecture from Rome Tor Vergata. He was a researcher at West Virginia University for the development of a sustainable housing prototype then built in Los Angeles and now exhibited at the Tellus museum in Cartersville. He collaborated with Dutch, Spanish and Italian offices on architectural research projects exhibited at the biennials of Rotterdam, Seoul, Madrid and Orleans, as well as participating in projects of international importance. He is now member of the research group hypermedia of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid where he develops national research projects on emergent urban lifestyles and their consequences on architecture and urban planning. He is also doing jointed research on living alone in the contemporary western cities together with the Sapienza University of Rome.

Atxu Amann y Alcocer

Atxu Amann y Alcocer holds a PhD in Architecture from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. She holds a degree in Urban Planning from the Centro de Estudios Urbanos del I.E.A.L. (M.A.P.). She has been a scholarship holder at the Technische Universität Darmstadt (Germany) in CAAD. She has been editor of the Journal of the Official College of Architects of Madrid. At the end of her degree in 1987, in association with Andrés Cánovas Alcaraz and Nicolás Maruri Mendoza, she founded Temperaturas Extremas. She has been director of postgraduate courses in Editorial Design for the European Social Fund. She is a lecturer on postgraduate courses in Editorial Graphic Design at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Complutense University of Madrid. She is currently a lecturer at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid, director of the research group Hypermedia of the UPM, and head of the educational innovation group of the same name. She is also creator and coordinator of the Master’s Degree in Architectural Communication and director of Doctoral Programme in Architectural Communication.