8. (Work)space, Society, and the Changing City

Session 1.

Friday 24 May 2024
Time: 9:00 – 10:30 
Place: Tieteiden talo, Room 104

1. Introducing T-winning Spaces 2035 project

10-minute presentation
Presenter: Dalia Milián Bernal, Tampere University

Due to the emergence of new (digital) technologies, novel working practices, and the possibilities offered by the various forms of transportation and mobility, work can be conducted from a variety of
locations, including public and semi-public spaces as well as the worker’s place of residence — the home. The characteristics of workspaces affect employee performance and wellbeing, and remote work can influence how we use spaces, commute, consume, and spend leisure time, with environmental and health consequences. In this presentation, we will introduce the ongoing project T-winning Spaces 2035, delving especially into the work packages of Tampere University. The project aims to increase understanding of the sustainability challenges of future digital remote working and how they can be addressed with novel spatial solutions and practices for households and employers. T-winning Spaces 2035 brings together a multidisciplinary team form the Aalto University, Tampere University, and Turku University.

2. Separateness in the Home: From Home-ness to Work-ness in a Post-Covid Environment

15-minute presentation + 5-minute discussion
Elena Marco, University of the West of England
Sonja Oliveira, University of Strathclyde
Danielle Sinnett, University of the West of England

COVID-19 brought unprecedented restrictive lockdown measures across the globe. This ‘enforced togetherness’ brought transformative changes in how homes were used and inhabited. The home was tested to its limits and the use of its spaces renegotiated, redesigned and resynchronised. Post-COVID, working practices are more flexible with many employers now adopting ‘hybrid working’ that formalise the use of the home as a workplace. This study presents the lockdown lived experiences of a small
number of architects using a novel interpretative phenomenological approach applied in an architectural context. The study identified four ‘lockdown-socio-spatial affordances of the home’: Connectivity,
Adaptability, Communality and Individuality, that must be included in future housing design. It also identified two critical attributes for the meaning of home: as a nurtured space and as a negotiated space.
Considering future housing design, in the context of homeworking, this study concluded that these four affordances were linked to the spatial adaptation of the home and the transition of the ‘outdoors’ into
the home. Spaciousness and cleanliness need to be designed-in so that spaces can be versatile. Digital and physical connectivity between the inside (e.g. reshaping rules, structures, routines) and outside (e.g. work, home-school or seeing friends) worlds must be delicately balanced to ensure a respite from the online world and conflicts within the household, to ensure the inhabitants’ physical, social and emotional wellbeing. Separateness from home- and work- communal environments must be reconsidered in future housing design and hybrid working policies, so inhabitants can disconnect and recharge from this ‘enforce togetherness’.

3. Telework as a domestic challenge in terms of environmental quality: from covid-19 experience to
the current Spanish scenario

15-minute presentation + 5-minute discussion
Presenters:
Teresa Cuerdo-Vilches, Eduardo Torroja Institute for Construction Sciences
Miguel Ángel Navas-Martín, Carlos III Health Institute

Teleworking has been a domestic task with an uneven distribution worldwide. Many studies tried to define its supposed advantages on sustainability and environment, family conciliation, productivity, or
time savings for personal promotion and leisure. It was not until the social COVID-19 lockdown, when the implications for households and individuals were studied in greater depth and in a realistic way.
Despite teleworking was boosted during the Spring 2020, it it was just an experiment, since the boundary conditions were largely exceptional, as a result of the social, economic and health moment in which it was established. At that time, however, no national or relevant studies were recorded that addressed the indoor environmental conditions of domestic spaces intended for these tasks, except the Spanish project [COVID-HAB], which made it from a mixed exploratory approach, through questionnaires, photographs and written testimonies. The results showed for more than 40% of the participating teleworking households, the lack of adequate and specific spaces for teleworking. The most valued qualities were natural lighting, the size of the room and the temperature, which was partially explained due to the need to reconcile and care in spaces such as the living room, when there were minors or other dependents. Rented homes, the smallest ones, and apartments, located in urban areas, were considered to have poorer environmental quality, resulting more inadequate. Currently, the CHAMBER national Spanish project is trying to establish, for a representative sample, a validated questionnaire where the environmental quality of these spaces can be evaluated, under normal conditions for the Spanish population. It aims to be replicable for other countries and regions.

4. Social pull of the office

15-minute presentation + 5-minute discussion

Suvi Nenonen, University of Helsinki
Inka Sankari, University of Helsinki
Jarna Heikkilä, University of Helsinki and HY247

Working from home and flexibility of work have increased the quality of life and productivity of many individuals in different fields of industry. However, the research has indicated that the work communities have suffered most of the lockdowns in Covid19 era. It is important to identify both the positive and negative effects of flexibility in individual, team and organizational levels. Additionally, one need to consider the role of workplaces at home and at office from the perspectives of working alone and together. To understand this more this research aims to identify the elements, which are bringing people back to office. The sample includes the employees working in academic support services and university administration. The data is gathered in 2022 and 2024. The results indicate that the top three reasons to office-based work are people, diversity of meetings and encounters and ergonomics.

The academic contribution of the research provides longitudinal insights for the research focusing on workplace preferences. It is also strengthening the understanding of working from home and preferences for home workplace. The practical contribution sets new requirements to workplace design encouraging facilities and workplace managers to focus on social characteristics of the office. The diversity of social encounters is presented as an application of the research results in academic workplaces. The determinant of collaboration intensity might be the new way to zone workplaces. The role of digital platforms and places are also discussed as a collaborative, even partially limited social experience.

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Session 2.

Friday 24 May 2024
Time: 14:45 – 16:15
Place: Tieteiden talo, Room 104

1. T-winning Spaces 2035: Understanding the home as a space of work

10-minute presentation
Jasmin Laitinen, Tampere University

Work produces space and the space it produces inevitable shapes socio-spatial relations which may lead to spatial injustices from a global to a domestic scale. In this presentation, we discuss initial insights from the research project T-winning Spaces 2035 – Work Package 2, which investigates the social and spatial implications of working at and from home to, later, reimagine spatial approaches for homeworking practices. We will begin by looking into some of the conditions that perpetrate and
perpetuate spatial injustices at the contours of working at and from home at a global, regional, local and domestic scale. Then, we focus on the domestic scale, to understand how the historical development of
our capitalist society and conceptions of work and home have spatialised, how the spatiality of contemporary precarious work intertwines with other spatialities of the home and how are these considerations related to broader discussions of housing design quality.

2. Domestic Peripheries: Spatialities of Invisibilized Reproductive Work

15-minute presentation + 5-minute discussion
Natacha Quintero González, BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg / TU Berlin
Lía Duarte Rodríguez, Hochschule Anhalt

This contribution presents a critical analysis of the so-called “maid’s room/servant’s room” (or cuarto de servicio) as a site of struggle within domestic spatialities of privilege and power. We present the home as a space that reproduces social inequalities across scales and contributes to the construction of the periphery, shaping hierarchies and power relations beyond its intimate and private boundaries (Caldeira, 2017). Considering space as a social product (Lefebvre, 1988) historically shaped by those
in power and a reality to be mapped (Peake et al., 2021), we aim to make visible the patriarchal and colonial dynamics involved in domestic work in two ways. First, through an analysis of architectural plans and photographs, which questions the narratives that idealize prestigious Latin American
architectural projects while omitting and rendering invisible the spatial constraints imposed on domestic workers within their modern designs. Second, through critical cartographies that link the intimate household scale with the rural and territorial based on the trajectories of live-in domestic workers in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, whose mobility has been legitimized by the demand for reproductive labor by the city’s privileged economic and social classes (Hochschild, 2001). Thus, we
situate the household and domesticity as an architectural-geographical alignment and a social relation to power (McClintock, 1995). We argue that these approaches to invisible peripheries demonstrate the
importance of transcalar analysis in highlighting the dialectical relations between privileged and marginalized spaces, which continually produce and reproduce social relations of dependency and power (Anderson, 2000; Federici, 2012). Furthermore, we emphasize the importance of critical
methodologies based on relational analysis and counter-mapping to address the agency of design in the reproduction of oppressive architectural typologies such as the maid’s room.

References
Anderson, B. (2000). Doing the Dirty Work?: The Global Politics of Domestic Labour, Palgrave Macmillan. 4–5.
Caldeira, T. (2017). Peripheral Urbanization: Autoconstruction, Transversal Logics, and Politics in Cities of the Global South.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775816658479
Federici, S. (2012). Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, reproduction, and feminist struggle. PM Press.
Hochschild, A. (2001): The nanny chain. The American Prospect. https://prospect.org/features/nanny-chain/
Lefebvre, H. (1988): The production of space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
McClintock, A. (1995): Imperial leather. Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest. First issued in hardback. New York, NY, London: Routledge.
Peake, L., Koleth, E., Tanyildiz, G. S., Reddy, R. N., & patrick/dp, darren. (2021). A Feminist Urban Theory for Our Time: Rethinking Social Reproduction and the Urban. John Wiley & Sons

3. Digital work futures: challenges in leveraging remote work for environmental and health benefits

15-minute presentation + 5-minute discussion
Presenter: Alonso Espinosa Mireles de Villafranca, Tampere University

While not new, remote working and working from home have surged since the COVID-19 pandemic, and there has been a shift in how accepted remote working is and how it is considered by workers, employers, and policymakers. In one of its original framings, remote working or telework was intended to reduce peak traffic congestion and improve work-life balance. However, the increasing readiness to embrace remote work together with some observations of emissions and air pollution during the
pandemic has reignited interest in using remote work as a tool for reducing carbon emissions, as well as improving health and environmental quality.

Transport is one of the two largest sectors accounting for energy consumption and carbon emissions globally and in Europe. In addition, by some estimates the energy consumption of office buildings is comparable to that of commuting. Therefore, it would seem that increased remote work would reduce emissions. However, working from home, or the change to remote working, seems to re-structure household travel patterns more fundamentally, change energy usage behaviour at home, and even lead people to move houses. Therefore, increasing remote working can reconfigure where people live at the city scale, and how they move through it.

In this presentation we will discuss, as part of our ongoing research in the T-Winning Spaces 2035 project, the conflicting evidence of the potential emission reductions that could be achieved through digital work futures; the mobility rebound effects associated with not commuting; and modelling challenges faced when trying to capture whole-system changes.

4. Unequal changes in outdoor air pollution exposure and residential relocations during and after
the COVID-19 pandemic in Helsinki Metropolitan Area, Finland

15-minute presentation + 5-minute discussion
Presenter: Ákos Gosztonyi, University of Helsinki

Lockdown measures, reduced economic activity and recommendations for teleworking led to a decline in air pollution during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in transportation-heavy metropolitan n.
regions all over the world. However, our recent preliminary findings indicate disparities in air pollution change emerging across socio-economic groups, including groups defined by their main type of activity and occupational status in Helsinki Metropolitan Area, during and extending beyond the first year of the pandemic. Such tendencies raise the concern of air pollution-related environmental segregation and environmental gentrification. Thus, in this conference session, beside illustrating disparities in outdoor air pollution change experienced during the pandemic, we present our preliminary findings on local air pollution’s differential effect on residential relocations according to socio-economic status from the time of phasing out of the pandemic-related measures as well. Our approach combines uniquely high-resolution spatial socio-economic information and air pollution data that are novel in investigating both pandemic-related environmental inequalities, as well as environmental segregation and gentrification.