Thinking the city through work

Abstract

Practices, organisations and sites of work are deeply entangled with urban development and impact on the way social interaction and spaces are experienced and constructed. Especially since the industrial revolution, spaces of work and home have been conceptually separated with boundaries drawn between the public and private sphere, between spheres of production and reproduction. Nevertheless, this divide has been subject to constant change and negotiation, with boundaries between the productive and reproductive sphere increasingly blurring—especially since the spread of digital technologies. The increasing muddying of these boundaries and what this might mean for our understanding of the urban is the central subject of this special feature. The included contributions therefore investigate how these blurring boundaries unfold in the city both on a social and spatial level in order to challenge and rethink the ways we conceptualise work in urban studies.

Keywords:

• work
• production
• reproduction
• blurring of boundaries
• digitisation
• urban

Introduction

Work can hardly be understood as a stable construct and its definitions are constantly undergoing revision. It is shaped over time and space and is subject to continuous struggles over claims and distributions by a variety of actors. Oftentimes, a distinction is made between productive and reproductive work, which are respectively assigned to particular spaces and spheres: public/work vs. private/home. Feminist (urban) theory has challenged this dualistic approach, and so too has the increasing digitisation of urban economies and everyday life today. With the emergence of digital technologies, work, as we see it, is increasingly difficult to classify neatly into either the sphere of production or reproduction. Rather, these boundaries, once seen as clear-cut, now seem to blur or at times, even disappear altogether, as was identified by early feminist scholars (see, for example Benston 1969; Dalla Costa and James 1972; Luxton 1980; Vogel 1973).

By thinking the city through work, this Special Feature discusses the increasing muddying of boundaries between spheres of production and reproduction in contemporary cities. In so doing, the feature further challenges the conceptual divide that is increasingly questioned in a deeper way with the rise of digital capitalism and its resulting work conditions. The contributions included in this Special Feature investigate how these blurring boundaries unfold in the city both on a social and spatial level in order to challenge and rethink the ways we conceptualise work in urban studies.

Thinking the city through work: old divisions—new questions

Ever since the nineteenth century, the process of urbanisation is deeply anchored in capitalist production. In the industrial cores, settlements were spatially organised around the separation of workplace and home, not least due to an increasing division of labour (Harvey 1978). The differentiation and specialisation of labour processes and their specific class character further institutionalised the separation of the spheres of production and reproduction (Laslett and Brenner 1989). Much of the theoretical debate, too, discussed production and reproduction as two different spheres, “based upon dualist dichotomies” (Harding and Blokland 2014, 202). This dualism worked well, as it suited a division of labour in social sciences more generally: in labour studies, as heirs of a “century of the labour man” (Ferguson and Li 2018), scholarship focused on research of labour relations in the factories and official work places, neglecting a broad range of work-arrangements in the realm of the household or the neighbourhood, often not legally coded and non-waged, or entirely non-remunerated (for this critique see for example Ferguson and Li 2018; van Dyk 2018; Glucksmann 2005; Linden 2008). Similarly, in urban studies, the sphere of production was often conceptualised as the public and visible one in which labour was exchanged for income. The reproductive sphere, on the other hand, was the private realm, in which family and household were seen as a sanctuary of privacy and intimacy and an antithesis to the sphere of market relations (for this critique in urban studies see: Hayden 1980; Hanson and Pratt 1988; Markusen 1980; Frank 2008; Kern 2020; Schuster and Höhne 2017 for an overview).

Under the guise of love and care, any form of reproductive work was not only made invisible, but was also naturalised and romanticised (Firestone 1970; Smith 1987; Weeks 2011, 2017). This gendered separate sphere model has been questioned since the 1970s at the latest and feminist and marxist scholars in particular have highlighted that home has always been a site of domestic labour which, although non-remunerated, essentially maintains the capitalist system (Dalla Costa and James 1972; Federici 1975; Luxton 1980). Feminist theorists have shown that “[s]ocial reproduction is an indispensable background condition for the possibility of economic production in a capitalist society” (Fraser 2016, 102). From their critique followed the demand that the unpaid work taking place within, and assigned to, a constructed “private sphere” needed to be valorised better and more broadly questioned the ongoing dichotomy of work and non-work (cf. debates on wages for housework, Dalla Costa and James 1972; Federici 1975). Today, the notion of care and care work addresses similar questions (England 2005; Thelen 2015; Fraser 2016).

With the growth of consumer capitalism and shifts from an economy centred on production to an economy centred on service, another emerging debate addresses the blurring of boundaries between spheres of production and reproduction. Glazer (1984) for instance talked about how the transfer of work from paid workers to consumers (for example in the retail food industry through self-service) resulted above all in the „appropriation of women’s work in the consumption of goods and services“ (Glazer 1984, 65) and shifted the distribution of work and its remuneration. Against this backdrop, Dujarier (2014, 2016) speaks of consumer work: consumers are put to work, when they use self-service machines, self-construct their commodities (for example IKEA furniture) or need to organise their consumption increasingly on their own in front of their desks. This is all the more evident in times of growing digitisation where territories of consumption and production are increasingly blurred (Terranova 2000; Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010; quoted in van Dyk 2018, 532). Forms of voluntary and unpaid labour gain currency (van Dyk 2018), promoted by platform companies, such as „sharing” and “building community” (Frenken and Schor 2017; Smith-Johnson 2020). Such “gifting” is studied as important practice that enables value extraction for platform companies (Fourcade and Kluttz 2020). The emerging debate around post-wage politics (van Dyk 2018; Monteith, Vicol, and Williams 2021) further looks at the “wide field of non-waged activities that are relevant to the process of capital accumulation—be it by value extraction, the externalisation of reproductive costs and exploitation of non-waged activities, or the appropriation of data based on user activity” (van Dyk 2018, 532).

In other words, capitalist organisation of social reproduction has a history—“boundaries delimiting ‘economy’ from ‘society’, ‘production’ from ‘reproduction’, and ‘work’ from ‘family’” (Fraser 2016, 103) are hence contested sites of struggle. We understand all “activities of provisioning, care-giving and interaction that produce and maintain social bonds, although it accords them no monetised value and treats them as if they were free” (Fraser 2016, 101) as socially reproductive activities. In so doing we do not limit the range of reproductive activities to a particular set of care services. We rather use the debate on production and reproduction to expand the range of economic practices that need to be considered in order to understand how cities function as centres for capitalist accumulation.

Building on the critique of the still persisting dualism of the spheres of production and reproduction in urban space and theory (Meillassoux 1975; McDowell 1983; 1997; Mingione 1991; Vaiou 1992; Merkel 2015), this Special Feature wants to push this debate further by looking at new forms of urban work under increasing digitisation. We build upon this work on the relation between capitalist production and care as a contradictory relationship, one of “separation-cum-dependence-cum-disavowal” (Fraser 2016, 103). The market and domestic sphere must be seen as continuous, blurred and interconnected. With the recent transformations of work towards a more global, knowledge-based and digital economy, these contradictions and interdependencies of spheres of production and reproduction face new challenges. Within this theoretical framework, the authors of this Special Feature demonstrate how especially through digital platforms, non-remunerated practices are (and always have been) deeply connected (with the market and power relations). The authors thereby investigate practices (for example, domestic or volunteer work) and spaces (for example, the home or the maker space) of work in the urban sphere where reproductive and productive labour practices meet and blur. It is here that new power relations and pressing questions require further critical investigation.

Work, digital capitalism and the urban

Today, based on the spread of digital technologies, work takes place in multiple sites and spaces and transcends the employer-employee system (Steyaert and Katz 2004; Brennan-Horley 2010). Platform technologies have enabled the emergence of new work spaces which challenge the idea that being a worker comes with a stable affiliation to a company which provides office space, or a fixed and monofunctional workplace. In this context, new forms of work refer, above all, to the rise in gig work, “work that is transacted via platforms but delivered locally and thus requires the worker to be physically present, and work that is transacted and delivered remotely via platforms” (Wood et al. 2019, 57). New temporalities and mobilities of work create novel interlinkages and forms of sociability in cities and redefine notions of proximity and intimacy (Gregg 2011; Margies and García 2018). Platforms create a new form of sociability, which becomes an accelerated form of trust necessary for their market interactions to function. This notion of marketised trust in the urban sphere is especially interesting to take into account since a particular feature of urban sociability has since the prominent debate by Louis Wirth (1938) and Georg Simmel (1908) always been that of anonymity. As such, anonymity can grant more freedom but also lead to estrangement and may aggravate the building of trust. Davidson and Infranca point to the fact that through their rating and review systems sharing economy platforms create an “anonymity workaround (…) to this classic urban challenge” (Davidson and Infranca 2016, 236). Dwellers rent their homes to strangers and digital technologies, such as platforms, enable new control tools (i.e. rating and review systems) that enable trust building and produce new forms of urban sociabilities. Pointing to these new sociabilities also reveals the way digitisation plays out on the ground and interacts with urban and socio-spatial realities.

This perspective then expands the debate on digitisation in urban studies. Digitisation here has been mainly discussed in how it matters for urban economic development, optimising navigation and planning processes as debates about the smart city, start-up city or the cyber city indicate (Söderström, Pasche and Klauser 2014; Angelo and Vormann 2018; Graham and Marvin 2002; Graham 2004; for a critical intervention into this, see Rose 2020 and Moss et al. (2021, this issue). In addition, the debate on how digitisation affects the organisation of work in the urban is often centred around online platforms (see for example the coinage of platform urbanism by Rodgers and Moore 2018). These digital structures build on the technical foundations created by the “new economy”, and incite new inquiries around the articulation of space and around new forms of organising labour processes. That said, digitisation is discussed in the continuation of earlier debates in urban economic geography on the socio-spatial organisation of the new economy and the importance of place in economies which from the outset do not require fixed work spaces (Pratt, Gill, and Spelthann 2007). Alongside this focus on the organisation of labour processes through platforms, theoretical interventions have centred around notions of infrastructure (see Plantin et al. 2018 for a description of the platform as infrastructure), and new forms of marketisation of urban life (Stabrowski 2017). For this reason, we argue, it is even more important to analyse the perspective of dwellers and workers who live in cities under digital transformations.

This Special Feature thus looks at the implications for those who work within these business models as well as at the circumstances digital capitalism has created. Even though labour conditions of the platform, sharing or gig economy (Scholz 2016; Srnicek 2016; Stabrowski 2017) are central here, contributions also look at the ways digital labour affects everyday urban life. We show how more generally, work as a central mode of securing livelihood is affected by the changing urban economies under digitisation. One overarching tension concerns the limits of visibility of labour. As Crain, Poster, and Cherry (2016) remind us “visible labour has traditionally been defined as work that is readily identifiable and overt. It is located in a physical “workplace” and is self-recognised as work by management, employees, and consumers. It is typically paid, occurs in the public sphere, is directly profit generating, and has historically been full-time, long-term, and state-regulated” (Crain, Poster, and Cherry 2016, 3). However, today, “the production/reproduction dualism and associated physical boundaries blur and spaces of domesticity and home life; the kitchens, bedrooms, gardens, church halls, play-parks, Sunday schools, mothers’ social groups, internet chat rooms and social networking forums become places where business gets done” (Ekinsmyth 2011, 106). Thus, we see, on the one hand, practices traditionally considered as non-work or non-remunerated work (parenting, household, etc.) getting redefined and on the other, fields considered as either private or public becoming subject to re-negotiation. Feminist scholars have long revealed how domestic labour (for example Daniels 1987) as well as emotional labour (Hochschild 1983) has remained invisible in everyday life. With new forms of work organised through and by digital infrastructures, we now see new forms of (in)visibility emerging. While it still holds true that the vast majority of invisible domestic workers are women, they are now increasingly joined by the global urban poor who work from their homes. For instance, they take on tasks for global platforms such as Facebook or YouTube “cleaning up” their content (Cherry 2016).

These current trends of new forms of sociability and (in)visibility challenge our understandings of work and non-work and thereby the (clear-cut) divide between spheres of production and reproduction. Our analysis of how to think cities through work therefore requires new analytical approaches.

Blurring boundaries: challenging the dualism of production and reproduction

This Special Feature argues that the market and domestic spheres have to be seen as continuous, blurred and interconnected. To start thinking the city through work, we draw on sociological literature discussing work as social practice. We understand work as entangled social and economic practices embedded in the making of the urban (Schilling 2020). Work is defined as “any human effort adding use value to goods and services” (Tilly and Tilly 1997, 22)—starting from here, how can we scrutinise accumulation processes that use digital technologies?

First, current forms of value extraction and capitalist accumulation challenge the idea of the working class limited to those who work for wages (van der Linden 2008, 18; Skeggs 2004, 2014). For Marx, “labor can become a commodity, an object of trade, in only one way that is truly capitalist, namely through free wage labor, in which the worker as a free individual can dispose of his [sic!] labour power as his own commodity” (van der Linden 2008, 19 quoting Marx Capital I, 272). The centrality of this ideal of the liberal subject and its foundations itself are shaking: according to this ideal, labour power is conceived as capacities that can be sold and separated from us as persons and as something to monetise and trade on a market. This understanding seems to foreclose important mechanisms of value production and forms of exploitation where the effort to seize value is not bound to a singular person’s capacity to produce or to offer service, but can be an unintended effect of being present, of consuming, of moving around, or an outcome of the gathering and combination of flows of information. Richardson’s discussion of sharing as postwork where “value is realised not so much in the content of the communication that is being shared but in the sharing process itself, and by extension the capacity to generate such circulation” (Richardson 2017, 300), is quite revealing in this regard. Similarly, the debate on prosumerism (Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010) indicates the intricate entanglement of production and consumption: a lot of “work” done does not fit the category of labour as separate from the sphere from reproduction. We consume and produce at the same time when we produce data on social media platforms that enable these to trade data commodities. In this way, processes of value production are rendered invisible. Here “invisibility happens because [these work practices] are associated (and confused) with leisure, are considered to be part of consumption, are seen as voluntary, and fall outside the legal structure” (Crain, Poster, and Cherry 2016, 6).

Second, alongside new lines of (in)visibilities of work, we also demonstrate how different economic and social practices are entangled. When opening one's home to temporary guests is staged and commodified on Airbnb or parents share their personal knowledge about parenting on the Internet and develop an economic activity out of it, lines between the domestic and the market sphere seem to blur and the clear-cut conceptual divide is difficult to maintain (Knaus 2018, 2020). As the examples show, spaces, times and practices of working, living and leisure increasingly merge under digital capitalism. They also show that it is no longer just a matter of claiming that reproductive activities are actual work and should be defined and recognised as such. The special feature shows that we need to understand that both spheres are spaces of productive and reproductive work at the same time. Organising livelihood always involves relational work of many kinds, like market transactions based on price and commodities or sharing gifts as friends and kin—where and when, and to what extend these economic spheres of the domestic and the market matter and intersect, requires careful empirical analysis (Bourdieu 1977; Zelizer 1996, 2012; Tsing 2013). Practices of reproduction and production have to be discussed together, and with that, the multiple forms of economic practice—exchanging, (re)distributing and gifting included (Schilling 2020). In other words, the blurring of boundaries between production and reproduction calls into question where and when value is actually produced, under which circumstances and how use and exchange value are redefined (Guyer 2004; Skeggs 2004, 2014). Taken together, the different contributions help to “identify […] the intersectionalities of struggle between different livelihood and survival struggles in cities” (Buckley 2018, 9) and to show “a more complex web of connections between labouring bodies in metropolitan space” (Buckley 2018, 8).

The boundaries through which distinctions between work and non-work are drawn, and also contested, are important sites of struggle and an important arena to study value production. It is these boundaries that legitimise, mask but also make visible the extraction of value. This blurring of boundaries may lead us to assume that productive and reproductive work now takes place in some borderless space. We believe, however, that the boundaries are not completely dissolved but rather modified and redrawn elsewhere. This also means that other or new forms of work are now being obscured and devalued. It is therefore important, we argue, to look at the boundaries between the economy of the domestic sphere and the market, for it is precisely through these boundaries that various forms of socio-spatial inequalities can be identified.

The importance of investigating this topic was further highlighted and accelerated by the global SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic which sheds a different light on the blurring of paid and reproductive work within the private sphere. In the past year, for many households the home became a site where paid work as well as reproductive duties such as childcare or looking after sick and elderly people were carried out. The blurring of these spatial and social boundaries had far reaching effects and fuelled existing inequalities. For example, for women who are still the main bearers of care work juggling paid work as well as reproductive tasks has become an extreme challenge which ultimately fosters gender stereotypes (Allmendinger 2021) and increases women's risk of dropping out of employment (UN Women 2020).

Structure of the special feature

The articles in this Special Feature collectively address the following questions: What do we find when we shift our attention from the dualistic model of production and reproduction spheres to an analysis of (work) spaces where the domestic and the market meet and merge? What can we learn about new forms of urban work when we do not look at the spatial containers of production and reproduction but rather to their (blurring) boundaries? We thereby study the blurring of boundaries by analytically distinguishing between (work) practices, (working) sites and organisations (of the labour process).

First, we look at the blurring of boundaries at the level of practices to render the mismatch between legal categories of work (including their associated social status) and the practices of value making more visible. The temporary and side character of many jobs done through or for platforms makes this even more important—as legal categories of work often do not reflect the actual practices of value making (Gruska and Böhm 2020; van Doorn and Adam 2020; van Doorn 2017; Aloisi 2016).

Second, as much of the labour in digital economies is no longer bound to a particular site where the work is done, the blurring of boundaries also plays out through the blurring of functionalities of sites and urban spaces. New office spaces emerge (as discussed in the literature on co-working spaces, see Merkel 2015), but also sites previously not associated with work at all are now being integrated in processes of value production in ambivalent ways.

Third, the new ways of organising labour, prominently through platforms, break with the idea of organisations as spatio-temporally fixed and stable units. This poses anew the question how memberships to organisations are negotiated, and how claims to owners of technological tools (such as platforms) can be articulated. Starting with the lens of blurred boundaries at the level of organisations helps researchers to take into account moments of disruption and fissures in technological assemblages (see i.e. Leszczynski 2020).

The articles in this Special Feature are organised around these three analytical entry points of practices, sites and organisations, each of them demonstrating how the blurring boundaries between spheres of production and reproduction play out in the city.

We begin the Special Feature by remembering that the intersection of market and domestic sphere is historically rooted. Kiley Goyette in her paper on Airbnb and women, combines analyses of housing and labour and looks specifically at the role of women and their spatio-economic practices using Airbnb to secure livelihoods by navigating through and between the spheres of production and reproduction. By embedding short-term rentals into their historical context, Goyette shows how Airbnb as a platform for short-term housing and supplemental income generation can be seen as the modern continuity of the blurring boundaries between social reproduction and (household) economy that already came into being in early industrial capitalism. It is, however, one that comes with new forms of socio-spatial inequalities. While it allows some women to earn a living or contribute to the household income through the practice of hosting, Airbnb’s new organisational power contributes to wider structural changes in contemporary cities (for example increasing rents, gentrification, stricter policy regulation, etc.). These, Goyette argues, then limit the possibilities for other women positioned lower in the class and race hierarchy to secure for production and reproduction.

Kavita Dattani, then, challenges the idea that the arrival of the platform in the on-demand domestic work sector has produced an encompassing “uberisation of domestic work”. By looking at women domestic workers in and around Delhi, Dattani probes Russel’s concept of the glitch to reveal how these digital urban infrastructures can sometimes produce mismatches and failures when they ignore socio-spatial relations within the city. Organising work through platforms is then first of all characterised by new exclusions that reproduce gendered and classed inequalities in the city. In addition, the process of platformisation itself, the author argues, comprises moments of frictions and fissures that totalising narratives on the potential of technological innovations risk to conceal. In this way, Dattani demonstrates how different forms of invisibility operate: on the one hand, as hidden domestic work in an informal economy and, on the other hand, as patriarchal narratives assuming that every individual has equal access to digital infrastructures independent of positions of class and gender.

Samantha Cenere, then, continues the analysis of a concrete place in the city that can be considered representative of the blurring boundaries in an increasingly digitised world of work. By analysing the doing of labour in Fablabs and Makerspaces in Turin, the author proposes to look more closely at the concrete practices that constitute the world of Makers. These range from entrepreneurial forms of work to leisure, post-work, and post-capitalist production, blurring clear-cut boundaries of production and reproduction. By adopting a relational Actor-Network-Theory approach, Cenere makes visible that value production at the Makerspace is connected to other sites and networks which make up the city as socio-technical assemblage.

Eva Mos similarly shows the multiple forms of human efforts needed to make platforms as parts of urban infrastructures and logistics work, specifically in the realm of the social sector. Mos assesses the contemporary platformisation of volunteer work and situates this process within a broader reconfiguration of urban governance and social policies in Germany. Based on a case study of the volunteer platform GoVolunteer located in Berlin, the author traces the shifts from social politics of redistribution to politics of coordination, in which the platform provides logistical solutions to social problems. The field of volunteering is an interesting case to analyse the blurring of boundaries of production and reproduction: While the social sector is often discussed as the opposite to economic reward and to capitalist logics, this article shows how unpaid work and urban sociability more broadly turn into platform assets, and thus become a source of wealth to be harnessed.

By thinking the city through work, this Special Feature and each of its contributions, then, aims at shedding light on the blurring boundaries between the spheres of production and reproduction, unveiling consequences for people and spaces. In doing so, we hope to provide starting points for further reflection on how we can conceptualise work in contexts where the domestic and the market merge and think about subversive or alternative ways of working and collaborating that can enable sustainability of (urban) livelihoods.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katharina Knaus

Katharina Knaus is associate researcher at the Center for Metropolitan Studies, Technical University, Berlin. Email: [email protected]

Nina Margies

Nina Margies is lecturer at the Department of Urban and Regional Sociology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Email: [email protected]

Hannah Schilling

Hannah Schilling is postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Political Sociology, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. Email: [email protected]