Mundane objects in the city: Laundry practices and the making and remaking of public/private sociality and space in London and New York

Sophie Watson

Urban Studies, 2015, vol. 52, issue 5, 876-890

Abstract: The paper considers how shifting laundry practices and technologies associated with dirty washing have over time summoned different spaces, socialities and socio-spatial assemblages in the city, enrolling different actors and multiple publics and constituting different associations, networks and relations in its wake as it travels from the home and back again. It argues that rather than being an inert object of unpleasant matter, whose encounter with humans has been largely restricted to certain categories of person for its transformation to re-use, and thus passed unnoticed, the paper explores how laundry practices have figured in producing and reproducing gendered (and classed) relations of labour, and enacting multiple socio-spatial, and gendered, relations and assemblages in the city, which have largely gone unnoticed in accounts of everyday urban life.

Keywords: everyday life in the city; laundry; London; New York; public realm; public space (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:52:y:2015:i:5:p:876-890

DOI: 10.1177/0042098014531630

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