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.