Re-configuring invisible labour: dignifying domestic work and cultivating community in suburbia, Johannesburg
Date
2016
Authors
Blumberg, Jessica Michele
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Abstract
Domestic workers in South Africa are a vulnerable work force who are not financially
or socially recognised for the significant role they play in sustaining homes, suburbs
and society. The topic of domestic work serves as a lens through which to analyse
the intersectional issues of race, gender and class in South Africa and their spatial
manifestations.
I have found that spatial principles employed, historically and currently, play a
substantial role in creating or upholding the unbalanced power relationship governing
domestic work. The spatial techniques of separation, isolation, concealment,
surveillance, front to back and leisure to work relationships for example, have become
so mundane and normalized in South African society that it is difficult to identify these
factors as facilitators of race, gender and class discrimination. My spatial approach
is to utilize these principles in a way that disrupts and draws attention to their original
objective.
The program aims to recognise the significance of this occupation, give domestic
Workers collective power to negotiate their working conditions and facilitate
social mobility. The building is a mix-use centre which incorporates business,
accommodation, communal and public facilities, activities and gathering spaces
a landscaped park. The business facilities incorporate existing services in a more
formalized, professionalized manner, ensuring fair remuneration and recognition
for quality services. The centre additionally provides services in more interactive,
sustainable and economically efficient ways than they are traditionally provided for
in individual private homes. These communal services include a children’s day care,
public laundry and eatery.
The intention is to create a prototype that may be reproduced in any suburb thereby
creating a network of centres. The selection of the park in Norwood as a site serves
to reactivate an underutilized public space and in so doing challenge the existing
relationships of work and leisure, public and private and social hierarchies in the
suburb. The position of this project in the relatively, sparsely populated suburbs
would change the racial and financial demographic. It would be a new typology
for high density, low cost/ government subsidised housing in a way that integrates
infrastructure and public space.
Description
This document is submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree:
Master of Arch[Prof] at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in the year 2015
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Citation
Blumberg, Jessica Michele (2016) Re-configuring invisible labour: dignifying domestic work and cultivating community in suburbia, Johannesburg, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, < http://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/22082>