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 (including architectural labor) in the first place. 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. Demographic changes, environmental crises, growing mobility, transformations of labor, 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 debates.

Gabrielle Schaad ist Postdoktorandin am Lehrstuhl für Geschichte und Theorie von Architektur, Kunst und Design an der Technischen Universität München.