HouseWorks and their action space as direct builders of their environment_english

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Houseworks and their action space as directbuilders of their environment.

Ester Gisbert Alemany Independent Researcher

[email protected] commonhworks.wordpres.com

Abstract: This research, developed for mydegree Project in Architecture in theUniversity of Alicante, intends to scrabblethe impact of everyday actions in directbuilding our environment. How thecontemporary individual can rebuild notonly its identity but also the physicalenvironment in which performs this actionsin its daily live using new "distributed"technologies. In the technological context,"opened" by the Internet, hacktivism, andDIWO DIY, recycling social,crowdsourcing,.. appears the possibility of asociety empowered with easy access tools.

Here, artistic practice has an essential roleof experimental avant-garde for proposingnew everyday practicesʼ tools. Versusarchitecture and urbanism that, despitehaving been traditionally responsible for thedefinition of the environment, are nowcharged with the burden of thecommoditization of the urban thing. Withthese objectives and context this researchtakes as its main strategy domestic workand its "space of action", thereby openingthe black box of standard housing and

closed pairs as public-private, male-femalework-leisure, individual-collective, that werehid under the skirts of the housewife ideal.In the search for references and as amethodology, Iʼve done a tracking ofmaterializing agents of the housewifestereotype, the main agent of domesticwork, scrabbling papers about everydayobjects design in history that focus on theformalization of the environment of middle-

class standard home, crossing severaldisciplines in the domestic act: history,economics, art, sociology and industry. Thisallows to have a conceptual framework ofdifferent paradigms of domestic work whichcame one after another in history, and aninstrumental framework which let us seehow objects and technology have changedthe way we do domestic work and the rolesof women and home. Also has uncoveredsome surprising institutions andmaterializing agents such as the kitchen-laboratory of Frederick, the "private club" ofthe nomadic girl, the ad of the 50ʼs, and the

"patchwork" of Child among others. This iswhere prospective research begins: byapplying methods and tools of variousartistic experiences to the field of domesticwork, and the outlining of possibleenvironments without housing or housewifebut individuals that perform themselveswhile they do care-work on his "body-home". Using interactive and de- or re-location tools, DIY-kits, creative recycling,social screening, small electronics,..;redefining concepts of hygiene, privacy,

body, professionalism,..; and recoveringforgotten agents or institutions; I propose amultidisciplinary methodology of projectingfor the daily that opens the "field of action"of the individual in their daily actions.

Keywords: Daily, Perform, Ability, Tool,Distributed, Empower, Realization



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Introduction

When I read, some years ago, Walter Benjamin's The author as producer written in 1934,I understood almost anything. But an image was left in my mind: the function of the writer is toget every reader to turn into a writer himself… For someone who is interested in the

participation of the user in architecture, this title and this image are very suggestive and Ibelieve they've been behind all my work as an architecture student. During the first years, thiswork had more to do with intangible strategies: relational, routine related and managementones, or “soft” material, light and ephemeral ones. Gradually, and mostly at urban proposals,this has been confronted to the reality around the architect's work: building cities and buildings.My work was devoted to the study of flexible typologies and the revaluation of unnoticed localelements. In those cases, it was somehow disturbing to have this reader-writer image on mymind, as long as it could only be satisfied with an imaginary that didn't draw much interestamong the architects-evaluators.

When considering the subject of my Final Project (FP), I thought about theinstrumentalization of that image. That is: thinking at how the user of architecture, as an expertabout his own life, can turn himself into a re-builder of his environment. Reading again

Benjamin's text, I assume that for this purpose we have to consider which place the author isoccupying inside the whole production process, which technical innovations he's proposing forthe transformation of this process, and how he makes them available to other producers. In ourtimes, and specially in the technological context unveiled by Internet, there are many practicesusing innovative tools that modify the ways culture is produced, tools that are broadly distributedand redefine the position of the author. We're talking not only about technological tools, butabout process related ones, too. There are experiences that, using those new technologies,question the city and the landscape. They usually don't take a place inside the city productionprocess, but manage to get to the very end consequences of the use of these techniques, whichthey usually distribute, and to produce real objects. Other practices manage to involve the userin the evaluation or the construction of the city by using social networks or squatter ethics. Theyusually don't achieve enough institutional power and the citizen that is doing an extra work by

participating can get disappointed, but they do have a huge media and exemplifying influence,in addition to creating and efficiently managing distributed and flexible organizations. Some ofthose experiences serve as an example for this work and are brought face to face with theconventional practices of environmental definition: architecture and urbanism, which take part ofa marketed and user distant production process with their laws, projects and procedures.

The aim is to propose a methodological environment for architect-inhabitants (recoveringthat writer-reader concept) that allows them to interact with traditional city producers. I've takenas design subject the Housework (HW) and its spaces for many reasons: people are experts oftheir own housework, whether doing it by themselves or not, and they do it necessarily in aquotidian way so it doesn't mean an extra work; each person has a recognized right to have aplace to do that work (reflected in the right to having a shelter), but it goes beyond as it channelsthe right to every supply needed to do that work, and materializes the right to individual privacy

that some works need. The modern architecture and urbanism took as a minimum unit of designthe house. They envisioned a user type, middle-class family, and created a product that met it. Ithink in today's society makes sense to think the city with the tools to do the HW, whethertechnological or social, rather than with the standard housing. Thus we have differentiated andactivated users that, through the conduct of their daily actions, and as the tools they use enablethem, build their environment.



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What Housework?

To begin, I should clarify what HW Iʼm talking about because it is a vague and unknownarea, despite itʼs ordinary. The literature of the subject, from housewives manuals to women ʼseconomic studies, usually does a somersault: from the female body to the political and

economic system. Because it is understood that the housewife manages a family unit within adwelling and so she contributes to the reproduction of society. This means that, from thedefinition of Lydia Child patchwork 1, some tasks overlap with other spatially and temporally:baking in the kitchen, while cleaning the bathroom and taking care of children and preparingthem for the society. It is a heterogeneous and subjective collection of tasks, which have incommon their realization within the home by the housewife. This makes it difficult to define andorganize domestic work. Manuals, from Catherine Beecher, have preferred spatial organization,dividing the tasks through the rooms and emphasizing the good organization of the house.Feminist studies prefer temporary organization because are dealing with social and economicundervaluation of the work or the precarious situation of domestic workers, focusing on themeasurement of time and cost of labor. This leads to paradoxical situations as the "3rd personcriteria": "activity that can be done by a person other than the one who benefits of its service"

that makes jobs such as body hygiene remain invisibles, while these works were made in publicinstitutions in other historical moments.2 Some planners are rethinking urban planning and cityfrom the safety or conciliation of domestic work criteria, but keeping as a minimum unit of designthe family house.

In this research, I preferred to think HW from the tools and spaces that allow making

it, in order to compare ways of making it and see how they build different settings. I understandthe HW as the set of works that each person does on her own body . I called it"ownbodywork", but it remains a collection of tasks difficult to organize. To this purpose it hasbeen interesting the book Hágalo usted mismo

3 that in developing a syllabus for the HWlearning in school, made an experimental tracking into homes and suggested a divisionaccording to the spatial and temporal scale of tasks differentiating, for example, daily personalgrooming from annual cleanup. Unlike other studies, it includes intangible works such as dietary

control or use of leisure, without the moral evaluation of the housewives manuals. I took this listas a base adding some other works.

1. McHugh, Kathleen Anne. American Domesticity. From How to Manual to Hollywood Melodrama. New York, OxfordUniversity Press, 1999, 30.2. Carrasco, Cristina. “El olvido histórico del trabajo de las mujeres”, Feminismos,

http://www.nodo50.org/feminismos/spip.php?article157 3. Fernández Enguita, Mariano. Hágalo usted mismo : la cualificación del trabajo doméstico, la crisis de su aprendizaje

y la responsabilidad de la escuela . Madrid : Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, Centro de Publicaciones, 1991.



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On this list and, based on the previous book, I tested a method of classification by theend object of the work, the operations performed and the type of work. This work might bevalued according to the complexity, the priority, the social value attributed and standardization.The technification of the work is classified by the degree of technical substitution and suppliesneeded, which give an idea of the spatial and temporal scale consequences of the work.Crossing all these data we could get lists of jobs classified by materials, time, priorities, etc..

This will get an interesting overview of HW and could objectively compare the different ways toperform a specific job and check the real technification and its urban and social implications. Wecould also intuit ways of optimizing the works.

Since the firsts feminists included in their agenda the HW and the middle class invented"the servant problem"4 there have been many attempts to optimize it. In the years of massiveindustrialization it was created the myth of the replacement of the housewife work by"appliances" and the American dream of single-family home fully equipped and dedicated toconsumption. This imagery of liberation through the technology was so well publicized byadvertising that silenced the debate on centralization of HW with public services, which intended

to follow the path of industrialization of other forms of household production such as agricultureor textiles. However, some researchers “claim that the rise of domestic technologies wasaccompanied by higher standards of cleanliness and care of children”. For example, “whilewashing machines washing reduced hardness of the task, it increased its frequency.” In otherstudies it is verified that the hours spent at HW by housewives even increased from the 20 to605.

In my informal list of 24 works, only 5 have been technically replaced and only for othersix there are technical tools that made work easier. It is also significant for me that generalcleanup work (not objects) have been very little mechanized when there exist cleaningapparatus for large areas. Maybe this is because itʼs the less valued work, or because theyhave not been able to industrialize it as well as others. It is not accidental that the moremechanized works are those who consume electricity6, as the companies manufacturingelectrical appliances were the same that sold energy.

I think that with the above data, these examples and our daily lives experience, the mythof liberating technology is taken apart, and I can justify that the purpose of my Final Project isnot the total technical substitution (robots and home automation as some friends to mesuggested when I told them I was rethinking the house from the HW); but trying to implement inthe field of HW new distributed tools and techniques, that in other fields have contributed to theempowerment of the individual.

4. McHugh, Kathleen Anne. Op. cit., 71.5. Lupton, Ellen y Miller, J. Abbot. El cuarto de baño, la cocina y la estética de los desperdicios. Madrid, CelesteEdiciones, 1995, 15.6. Lupton, Ellen y Miller, J. Abbot. Op. cit., 23.



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Houskeeping and its action space

We can understand this technology paradox with the concept of "action space" in which apractice is performed. Taking the definition of Otto Von Busch in his thesis7 , the space of actionis the “the very hands-on opportunities offered to us by the combination of skills, tools and

materials. ... a zone of distributed potentiality related to our abilities to interact with the world...an area in which we move and make decisions about our lives, our everyday environment,things we think, act and do. It is a domain, geographical as well as practical and conceptualwhere we feel comfortable to make decisions and take action... in which we feel comfortable tomake these decisions and act”. To my proposal is very important the possibility of makingdecisions and we must differentiate it form the spatial consequences that the works have. Forexample, when the supermarket and the refrigerator replaced the work of cultivating andpreservation for solving the problem of abundance of products in one season and scarcity inanother, they extended the spatial consequences of our work. The food companies grow on amuch larger scale than our garden and the fridge needs energy produced in large power plantsand distributed by major infrastructures. This does not mean that the action space of this workhas increased, on the contrary it has shrunk, these tools make us passive consumers who can

only choose one product or another or one light fare or other, but it doesnʼt allow us to decide onfertilizers and water, nor on the possible installation of nuclear energy.

Von Busch talks about the tools as weapons in the forefront of the struggle to expand ouraction space and uses the term "hybrid" of Bruno Latour to refer to the associations we makewith them. Each new tool provides a new distribution of power in the network of entities thatmust act together to perform a job8 .

In an attempt to define the distribution of skills in the HW I have done a scan throughsome academic works on the design of everyday objects in history, dealing with theformalization of the standard home environment of middle-class from various disciplines.Redistribution is generally a "emancipatory" one, with it “we give up our field of activity to a pre-packaged one” and to “executable” technical tools. This means that for the use of the tools weneed to change our routines of action and adapt our standards to those proposed by the tool inexchange for more time for other things. A great example of this are the food processors thatindicate the steps to follow in his own recipes in a "test of discipline and skill,"9 it will be difficultto appropriate the technology of that robot to change these processes. All the tools assume, infact, training, but those operating as "instructables" are more adaptive and expand the space ofaction by appropriation and allowing us to “be proud of our work”.

7. Von Busch, Otto. FASHION-able: Hacktivism and Engaged Fashion Design. Gothenburg, Intellecta Docusys, 2008,41.8. Von Busch, Otto. Op. cit., 43.9. Von Busch, Otto. Op. cit., 44.



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Housework Institutions

Until now, the institution of the house with its technical furniture and appliances hasdefined the field of action of the HW. Here I raise the possibility of crossing the border

through tools that, although distributed, are organized in other institutions, and the

possibility of shaping the city through these institutions. The ways to expand the space ofaction do not necessarily have to be products or techniques, Internet-based contemporaryexperiences, the DIY and design history teaches us that HW can be extended by means ofmanuals, management plans, shared tools, ... However, without being manufactured products towhose technology we have no access, may also act shrinking our space of action and this maybe a decision that we take for expanding another space. Everyone should be able to make theirdaily work in a field of action determined by themselves. This person would participate in someinstitutions and not in others and the sum of spaces of action that the tools of these institutionswould offer her, constitute her field of action.

Kathleen McHugh says that her book American Domesticity 10 is no exception to the

recurrent tendency in domestic discourses produced by women to use the HW as a strategy.Every time someone has thought about the paradigm of the housewife or challenged it, all the

institutions that contain it have been mobilized trying to answer Benjamin's question: “For whomdo you write?” Or better, “For whom is this technique useful?”

11 This study is neither anexception, and to display these strategies I have made this diagram that represents different

"ideal" of housewifes. Each has shaped the domestic resident paradigm (female) in ahistorical moment but, when the paradigm changed, the values that character has played arenot lost but added and mixed to form the amalgam of meanings the housewife has today.

10. McHugh, Kathleen Anne. Op. cit., 11.11. Benjamín, Walter. El autor como productor. México, Itaca, 2004.



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Among those meanings (coincidentally) domestic work itself disappears. So the researchhas been tracking it to find what worker is proposed, in which space is working and whatpolitics, social and economic identity is proposed. Throughout texts, films or investigations inwhich are the characters appear, Iʼve drawn a "map" of identities, roles, and institutions whichserves to find some definitions, institutions and tools, essential to the expansion of fields ofaction, that were hidden under standard housing: as the "patchwork" of Child, the "Club" of the

nomad girl Toyo Ito in Tokyo

12

, the "kitchen laboratory" of Frederick or "community facilities' ofPeirce13. It also helps to have a historical space to place my new workers and to visualizechanges in the role of women and home. The “nomad girl” and his club could not exist withoutthe city of Tokyo, nor “the material feminist” and her public equipments without the Americansuffrage movement, even they had influence outside these contexts. Instead, the centralamalgam consumer-appliance-market-private-family-nation has spread throughout the worldwithin the liberal market global.

12. Ábalos, Iñaki. La buena vida: visita guiada a las casas de la modernidad. Barcelona, Gustavo Gili, 2000.13. Hayden, Dolores. The grand domestic revolution. Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1981, 183.



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Childʼs “Frugal Housewife” Beecherʼs “Domestic Economist”

Frederickʼs “Domestic Engineer” Friedanʼs “Mechanical Bride”

Itoʼs “Nomadic Girl” Peirceʼs “Material Feminist”



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Relocation of domestic work

In the abstract global context it seems we could expect little impact of the completion ofHW. Here I recover the concept of literary theory signify'in

14, which gives a key to the minoritiesin their search for their own language and, by extension, their identity. The consciousness of

their own language, the dialect, matters but remaining in it without insisting on the difference.Signify'in is daring with the language of another, the dominant, but not submitting to it, as so farhas made the HW in standard housing, but doing it ownselfʼs. As in the fables for children inwhich the smallest is the smartest and the strongest is tricked with its own weapons, this is

about signify ̓ in the tools of the tradition of architecture (urban, white, male and expert),

which has a greater field of action, with the lighter tools of the tradition of HW and

distributed technologies.

In seeking the proper tools to extend our field of action all identities influence. It is not thesame to perform leisure work in a rural setting that in an urban one or cooking works in anupland area than in an orchard, or to take a Turkish bath than to go to a gym. The context in

which we will work will make some tools be more effective than others, we must find

what are the tools used for the construction of a concret environment and signify ̓ in

them to get a real empowerment of our daily action.

In the same way that "the speaker does not draw the words from the dictionary, they existin otherʼs mouth, in his context and serving his intentions"

15, I've located the Final Project

work in three current and specific urban situations : the Baixa de Lisboa , abandonedhistoric center of a European capital, the Huerta de Alicante in Mutxamel, being colonized bythe expansion of a metropolitan area; and the Mediterranean forest of La Torre de les Maçanes,in degradation and danger because of its abandonment or urbanization. Each one has adifferent urban and domestic situation, and also different social actors. These places are

parliament-scenarios in which these actors project their desires and use the unequal

powers they have on them. The domestic works try to support themselves in the morepatrimonial elements, that are, therefore, more obliged to negotiation and representation of allactors. In each of these places the valuation of the elements and the negotiating spaces aredifferent. My theory is that, through a new instrumentation and relocation of HW in these

“common” spaces, users who perform them can expand their field of action and gain

more representation and power in the construction of these environments than they had

performing them in the private house16.

14. Fry, Paul.15. Íbidem.16. Jaque, Andrés y Hurlé Pablo. “Arquitectura Parlamento”, Archfarm, 13, 2009.



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Tools of the new Domestic Work

The diagram below is a summary of tools, designs and institutions I mobilized in theproposals for the FP, with references to the "artistic" or new technologies projects underlying theproposals. These are examples of how you might get some of the goals set so far:

innovation in performing of the HW, the instrumentalization to increase the field ofaction and get more power in city public trading. I like to refer to these experiencesbecause, unlike the conventional architecture, manage these objectives without necessarilypassing a previous project that needs to be validated by other experts, not the usersthemselves, to be done.

For example, diagnosis maps of the project 22@ at Poble Nou of the Group rotorr_ 17,made between 2001 and 2004 are also adventure maps, action maps. On the routes (with fencebreaks, access to restricted areas away from the monitoring points, climbing, ...) we discovered

how different builders and investors were colonizing the area and replacing its previousinhabitants. Today there is already a tradition of civic mapping conflicts with wiki-software thatallows collective editing of maps. The case of Poble Now! is special because in addition tovisualize the situation, it is able to develop specific set of tools for urban adventure in areasunder construction. With their workshops to learn climbing sculptures and terraces, and buildingmaterials needed for this, they increase citizenʼs space of action, that is enabled to movearound the city through places that would not reached without them. With their signal system,the choice of controversial sites and loaded with irony, they take the urban commodification,hardly accessible, to an area where they can interact with it. This is what I've tried to do whilemapping the locations of the Final Project.

17. http://rotorrr.org/



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Rotorr Colective Images from their project Poble Now

Their tools for adventure have to do with constructive techniques of social recycling, DIYand squatter ethics, from which also exists now a great tradition. In the case of SantiagoCirugeda, he manages to trick planning authorities and build into their regulations for muchlower prices directly with operative projects. In his recently introduced video ¿Cuánto quieres?

18, he shows how the current crisis in the construction industry has led his Recetas Urbanas 19 to

be a real alternative to conventional construction. In the video a real estate businessman asksthe artist to “output” the materials he has in stock with the art grants he gets for his work beingexperimental.

In the maps of the FP we can see that the reconstruction of the Baixa Pombalina will beheld by a Sociedade de Rehabilitaçâo Urbana that values the buildings from the rehabilitation

and sale price and allows other agencies to express about the city's image heritage, that ishighly valued although very poorly preserved. All this is quite far from the everyday life of Lisboncitizens. However, in Lisbon there is a Programa Local de Habitaçâo (PLH) that is moreparticipatory and public. By mapping the PLH strategies there appear equipamientos de

proximidade , casas vazias municipales, and hotéis sociais for people in transition because ofresettlement and rehabilitation processes. Places to, for example, host HW recovering the oldidea of public thermal baths or thermal institution and investigate new typologies between thecollective and private. On the map I identified heritage buildings that are abandoned and in verypoor condition, which are municipal property.

18. http://colectivosenlared.org/blogs/2010/04/19/¿cuanto-quieres/ 19. http://www.recetasurbanas.net/



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The proposal considers rehabilitating the buildings that are more damaged, withscaffolding and other equipment for strengthening of structures, to become super techequipments that can accommodate all the bathroom needs of the neighborhood. This wouldallow the other buildings that are not in such bad shape to be inhabited without expensive worksthat destroy patrimonial values in order to install the equipment of a standard housing and thatdepend on megaempreitadas of large real estate and building companies.



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In the case of the huerta in Mutxamel there is a patrimonial recognition for its history ofcommon management of water through the network of canals still in use20. In the map of actorswe see that the network belongs to the Comunidad de Regantes with decreasing number ofmembers and headed now by a large agribusiness company. By law, it controls the sale of thedepurated water for agriculture, but the recent actions proposed would convert the network tothe irrigation of bungalowsʼ gardens that urbanize the huerta .

In mapping this developing process I have located the places where the huerta meetswith the dense urban grid, where many potential guests for kitchens run by housewives live.These kitchens are built with recycled containers and equipment and are located next to a low

cost wastewater recycling infrastructure. As there is no recovery plan for the huerta , the goal isto colonize the network through the sale of this recycled water to farmers and the demand forlocal products, to reactivate that space and gain power in decision making processes.

20. Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge, CambridgeUniversity Press, 1991, 78.



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In the case of forest in La Torre, exists a Plan Forestal Autonómico governing land useand protection of unique species, as well as valuing public leisure space. HW is in a digitalhybrid space added in to play games, social relations, walks and shelter, through themanagement of a digital social network. As the patrimonial value is very diffuse the goal is tocreate a map and collective catalog that defines what is valuable to citizens while they performsuch works.

The Conselleria de Medio Ambiente , the City Council and Land Stewardship Foundationsestablish fairly flexible rules on unprotected and abandoned forest areas. This is understood asan opportunity for the reconstruction of landscape with the rules the social network creates.



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This broadened view of the self becomes an extension of the ecosystem of the body inthe installation DrinkPee of Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray22. Visitors are invited to sit on a toiletin front of a fountain as if to drinking their own urine treated with homemade purification systemthat takes advantage of nutrients extracted from the urine to fertilize a plant. This is not only areflection, personal kits for the recycling of urine at home are distributed and explain theinfluence of the products we eat (food and medicines) when they return through our urine to

nature. It also explains how the centralized infrastructure-intensive processes need to removethese substances. With that tool the space of action is augmented and the tool is comparablewith the expensive conventional system.

Britta & Becca Images from their project drinkpeedrinkpee

Technical knowledge is democratized in utilization of these kits daily and makes usersbecome experts in their own urine and the technology used. Now there are many experiencesthat develop the concept of "citizen science" and create scientific databases on urban wildlifeamong other things, enrolling citizens in their conduct following the pioneering example of

Wikipedia. I want to comment on the project by Natalie Jeremijenko OOZ23, which I think is astep forward in this field. It's a zoo without cages in which humans are given a set of actions thatcause reactions in animals that are stored in a file and interpreted collectively. For theinteraction with the geese a robot-goose was manufactured, the visitors manage it thanks to achair interface and the robot can follow other ducks and even “talk” to them. The robot recordsthe interactions and the visitors add it to the database with its interpretation. The result is thecollective creation of a new language goose-human, not directed by scientific experts. Thismakes the authority over what the ducks mean is distributed.

22. http://brittaandrebecca.org/ 23. http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/ooz/



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Following this example, proposals in my FP have included monitoring devices andcollective databases that are created when performing the HW. The action space of domesticworkers is expanded greatly within their own community because they don ʼt have to translatetheir needs or their knowledge of the actual work to other disciplines that they donʼt control. Thisis true in the case of La Torre, where the project enrolls physical and digital visitors thanks to it ʼsplayful approach. The assessment made by them of natural spaces and species builds a

collective database, which has a collector function and training one, getting an increasingnumber of expert visitors. From the catalog, bureaucracies would be made providing access tofunding that often depends only on the social assessment and the acceptance of the owners.There have been some experiences of this with monumental trees as the Catálogo de árboles

Monumentales 24.

Finally, the subject of collectivization of work appears. Be within a user communitysupposes sharing knowledge and technology but also tools. Sharing space and equipment has

been one of the major topics of the design for domestic work in history. The nineteenth centuryutopian communities took it to its logical conclusion, kitchen-less houses linked to centralkitchens in apartments or garden cities attempted to maintain privacy of the bedroom25. In thesecases they faced the problem of uniformity and the difficult management of common equipment.

In my proposal I try to centralize the election of choices of HW, so each person increasesher action space through choice and through knowledge, and through the field of action thatacquires the community of users because of its greater scale. But at the same time, I proposesystems and tools that the individual user controls directly expanding its action space.

24. http://somdepoble.com/wiki/index.php?title=Catàleg_d'Arbres_Monumentals

25. Hayden, Dolores. Op. cit.



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Centralized kitchens in Mutxamel makes the water and waste recycling have more impactand permits it to colonize the irrigation network in competition with other inputs of water. Thesubscription system allows customization of the diet within the culinary offer and deciding if wewant organic products, local or both. But the system of deferred cooking, satellite kitchens andvending machines allow each person to cook and increases your chances with the knowledge ofothers organized in a digital cookbook.

In Baixa the module system and the redundant staircase create custom paths forregeneration of the body. Blocking flights allows using individual modules and creating zones of

privacy. Sharing the modules creates more bathing possibilities for all but the privatization ofsome sections of the staircase extends other that become more public. So the staicase is aclear object of negotiation between the inhabitants and users of equipment. However, thedependence on the industry for the manufacture of modules and mechanization bathroomcleaning, shrinks the field of action. This collective equipment is proposed to function as a LivingLab26, where users and producers innovate together. Through the monitoring system ofexpenditures, temperature and humidity it creates a community of expert users that collaboratein the industry's innovations and can conduct them.

26. http://www.openlivinglabs.eu/aboutus



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HouseWorks and their action space as direct builders of their environment_english

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