An analysis of how systems of care have changed and their impact on architecture.
Care work is at once omnipresent and invisible. It encompasses all forms of socially necessary—or reproductive—labor: raising children, cooking, cleaning, shopping, looking after the elderly and the ill, and many other tasks. It is what allows for, and sustains, productive labor. Although economic production depends on the work of social reproduction, care work is usually unpaid and pushed out of sight. It is indisputable that care work falls disproportionately upon women, and unevenly along lines of race and class. In this issue of gta papers, the authors look at how this unpaid care labor has affected architectural labor and approaches. As this book shows, demographic changes, environmental crises, growing mobility, and the reconfiguration of traditional institutions of care—from the nuclear family to welfare state provisions—have made the inequity of care a key problem in architectural debate.