Making of Homes as Workplaces: Notes for a Spatial Approach to Women’s Livelihood

Abstract

Understanding women’s work requires going beyond traditional theorizations of paid employment by incorporating both their work and care responsibilities. The complexity of this is apparent when looking at home-based work, which is a significant category of women’s informal employment. The making of “home” and “workplace” is characterized by particular sets of negotiations and relations in the lives of home-based workers, specifically in resettlement colonies. Based on detailed interviews with women home-based workers in two resettlement colonies—Kalyanpuri and Savda Ghevra in the city of Delhi, the paper aims to qualitatively understand how home-based work is constituted and the implications of how the home becomes the workplace as well. It analyses how women leverage space and time to structure paid and unpaid work while accommodating the costs and risks that they come to bear owing to their location both within homes and the larger value chains. It argues for a more synchronous approach between housing and livelihood policies and programmes that are able to factor in women’s realities and aspirations.