Labour: The practice of maintenance in contemporary public spaceOngoing clean-and-repair labour not only ensures the good health and functionality of the physical structures of public space, it also aids the communication of aesthetic messages attached to the urban public realm. Here, maintenance labour is understood and examined as a key aesthetic agent for architecture generally and, more specifically, for public space, where controlling maintenance protocols translate into sanitised spaces that fit well with some of the characteristic architectural and urban design aesthetics of today’s public realm.¹ These are communicated through the presentation of orderly and pristine public spaces, where cleanliness equals safety and safety equals accessibility, however questionable the notion of accessibility in this equation might be in privately-owned public spaces (POPS).

This approach to maintenance as being a critical aesthetic agent in the architecture of public space is different from the more usual technocratic approach currently followed by the architectural profession, which considers maintenance a technical factor to be addressed alongside such other responsibilities, such as health and safety.

Other perspectives on the subject of maintenance present a wider, cross-referenced frame. In the essay ‘Maintenance and Care’, Shannon Mattern affirms:

In many academic disciplines and professional practices — architecture, urban studies, labor history, development economics, and the information sciences, just to name a few — maintenance has taken on new resonance as a theoretical framework, an ethos, a methodology, and a political cause. This is an exciting area of inquiry precisely because the lines between scholarship and practice are blurred. To study maintenance is itself an act of maintenance. To fill in the gaps in this literature, to draw connections among different disciplines, is an act of repair or, simply, of taking care — connecting threads, mending holes, amplifying quiet voices. ⁶

Mattern’s remarks resonate with the methodology used to advance the research informing this book. As practice-based research, it aimed to identify key maintenance strategies used for the implementation and preservation of con-temporary public spaces, and to understand how these strategies translate into protocols of labour, programmes of use and the communication of ‘desired’ aesthetics of public space. Mattern also explains that “if we want to better understand and apply maintenance…we need to acknowledge traditions of women’s work, domestic and reproductive labor, and all acts of preservation and conservation, formal and informal”. She outlines maintenance as ‘a corrective framework’, in reference to ‘a broken world’. In this sense, maintenance labour in the context of Granary Square appears ambiguous: care and repair in this space are not performed to reconstruct over urban sites in ‘decline’, but to legitimise and preserve the new, that is, as a natural effect of ‘innovation’ and regeneration strategies put in place to deal with ‘urban decay’ via cleansing.⁷ Alongside reflections on innovation and cleansing, this book focuses on the intersection between maintenance and architectural aesthetics, whereby investment in maintenance secures the communication of architecture and urban environments ‘as image and as ideal’.

The connection between cleaning and repair maintenance and aesthetic ideals, although often overlooked, is not foreign to architecture. Recalling Le Corbusier’s The Decorative Art of Today (1925), Mark Wigley quotes Le Corbusier asserting that “the mark of purity and integrity is the unmarked wall”. He explains that “the whole moral, ethical, functional and even technical superiority of architecture is seen to hang on the whiteness of its surfaces”,⁸ and observes that it is in texts aimed at non-specialists — rather than in architectural literature — that a deeper understanding of the issues at stake behind the modernist white wall can be found. He recollects architect Stephen Gardiner’s explanations about how white walls connect the buildings in a Mediterranean village and the buildings of modern architecture, in a publication for lay publics:

“Whitewash was also a visual bond between the buildings of the island villages; like bare essentials that hold people together, whitewash was a bond that held aesthetics together… Thus white became the bond between Le Corbusier’s early buildings. In consequence, it became the bond between all European architectural modern movements of the 1920’s and 1930’s, white was the theme that held the total picture together.”⁹

Wigley concludes that the reason why whitewash is not analysed more incisively in architecture is because “the visible ageing of the white wall calls into question architecture’s ability to transcend the turnover of fashionable styles. Superficial flaws become deep threats”.¹⁰ In the context of this book, the proposed understanding of maintenance labour as spatial practice — rather than as subdued set of cleaning-and-repairing duties aimed at preserving white walls ageless — is aimed at finding strategies for overcoming the dominance of fashionable styles when reflecting on architecture and urban design aesthetics, and ultimately on taste.

It appears necessary here to consider that the desire for clean and sanitised aesthetics that marked 20th-century architecture practice and ideology — a mark particularly visible on the design of both public and private housing 11 — appears to have moved into contemporary public space design. And that this move implies an accompanying transfer of responsibility for aesthetic guidance from the architect’s hands to those in charge of developing and managing the public realm, interested as they are in achieving a perception of safety and accessibility via cleanliness which, in turn, establishes an important aesthetic bond between curated groups of users, via sanitised and orderly public spaces.

In addition to architects, urban planners and users, maintenance workers are crucial agents in the construction of public space in general, and of Granary Square in particular. Cleaners, in their particular capacity as agents and custodians of the cleanliness-equals-safety formula, come to represent the King’s Cross Estate as they clean its public realm during their daily shifts. With their uniforms on, the cleaners ‘embody the estate’, that is, they act as its representatives. Via cleanliness and sanitation, they support the iterative, daily construction and communication of the estate. But, although the result of their labour visibly reflects and sustains the corporate project, the cleaners themselves remain largely invisible as the active makers of the public realm, or as the spatial agents that they are.

In art, practices that focus on labour have helped to critically highlight and address issues relating to how public space is coded and perceived, specifically with regard to the slim recognition given to maintenance labour, which Mierle Laderman Ukeles translated into Maintenance Art. Starting with her Manifesto For Maintenance Art 1969!, Ukeles — a promising artist who also acquired the roles of household carer and cleaner after she gave birth to her first child — declared: “Everything I say is Art is Art. Everything I do is Art is Art”.¹² She initially sited her work within the public realm of New York City and has worked voluntarily as artist in residence at the city’s Department of Sanitation for many years. Within the context of artistic practice, Ukeles equates maintenance labour with performance art, considering both to be visual cultural practices. Talking about her art, she explains:

All this work has a long history in the roots of modern Western Art — from futurist machine dances, to early Russian art, to German dada, to Stravinsky and Fernand Leger — only I did it of the canvas in real life, not ‘realistic’ but real — that’s the advance… It is art [that] involves real work systems being extended right into a cultural manifestation, self-consciously so. This is not clearly understood at this point in time.¹³

This book also considers maintenance art, which Ukeles describes as her work “of the canvas in real life”, in terms of spatial practice, with particular reference to Henri Lefebvre’s description of social space in his work The Production of Space. Here, Lefebvre explains how space has been reduced to an abstraction of form, with such specialists as architects or urban planners traditionally operating, to borrow Ukeles’ expression, ‘on the canvas’, that is, through a well-established professional routine that “fetishizes abstraction and imposes it as the norm”,¹⁴ resulting in the “abstraction of the ‘user’” and rendering “our time…this most essential part of lived experience…no longer visible to us, no longer intelligible”.¹⁵ In describing social space as being subdued by the dominance of abstraction, Lefebvre helpfully suggests a connection between performance practice and spatial practice, which this book explores. Lefebvre’s lament that “with the advent of modernity time has vanished from social space”,¹⁶ pinpoints time as the very element that a critique of space aims to re-incorporate into processes for designing the production of space, and resonates with performance art, which as a time-based practice, or live art, works with time as its base material. Although largely overlooked in form-based, mainstream architectural design, time is manifested through use and user’s actions, as well as through decay, a process fundamentally linked with urban regeneration. This affects urban change through such large-scale projects as the King’s Cross Estate in London, where urban ‘improvement’ is delivered through ‘innovation’, as opposed to maintenance and repair, understood here as a regenerative strategy at the urban scale.¹⁷

The ‘fetishisation’ of abstraction in professions dedicated to produce space results in a spatial split — between dominant and dominated spaces — which implies a further split for practicing communities: While the professional activities of the architects, planners, engineers, city officials, etc. produce the dominant space of representations, the various practices of the everyday, which enable the continuous production of space through time, are performed by people who are not specialists in this field. Many users remain under-represented and/ or displaced as a result of strategies devised by estate management to exercise a greater level of control over the use of space than architectural design may allow. Management, operating on the premise that “what makes public space is use”,18 brings users back to the space, but requires them to adhere strictly to a controlled expectation of how to perform within it. This approach is similar, to some extent, to that used to manage maintenance workers — hierarchies on site are well maintained, with users, as well as site workers, fulfilling a service of representing the estate, not the other way around.

In Granary Square, a consistent, long-term representation of the King’s Cross Estate is delivered daily by the estate’s management team, not only by way of controlled programmes of use, as discussed above, but also through highly efficient maintenance protocols. This, it is argued here, implies a design transfer analogous to the common architect-to-user transfer that occurs after buildings are delivered: via maintenance practices, long-term care for public space is transferred from architecture to management, now publicly responsible and impactful at the metropolitan scale.

Within the framework of spatial practice, function has started to be addressed in some ways that are different from those associated with the modern project, that is, a series of set programmes of use, strongly linked to architectural form. More specifically, performance has begun to be translated into architecture, through what Alex Schweder has coined Performance Architecture, a practice that redefines entrenched ideas of function and programme, offering a simple but transformative thought: “the notion of performance already exists in architecture, but is not named as such… Architects use the term ‘program’”.¹⁹ Performance practice, however, remains underexplored as a method for critically addressing the codes and practices guiding the production of contemporary public space, in spite of widespread consensus on the view that “what makes public space is use”.²⁰ Such consensus suggests that architectural practice could counterbalance the stasis of form by observing the ways in which users’ actions, their performances, are curated and time-managed in contemporary public spaces. Here, this includes the careful inspection of the design and scheduling of maintenance labour as impactful spatial practice, to able to translate maintenance strategies and protocols into critical projects.²¹

In what follows, I trace the history of the politics of visibility in public space in connection with maintenance labour, and examine some of the ways in which these traditionally translate into architectural design. I also present spatial strategies that have the potential to help counterbalance controlled visibility and labour in contemporary public space.

Visibility: As a practice of public space

The exclusion of specific groups from public sight was practised as a means of achieving gender and class domination in ancient Greece. In Athens, women were publicly invisible, regarded as unsuitable to participate in public life in the agora, and expected to remain home, where their ‘cold bodies’ belonged and would be better ‘protected’. Females “were thought to be colder versions of men”, as “the Greeks used the science of body heat…to enact rules of domination and subordination”, whereby their “understanding of the human body suggested different rights, and differences in urban spaces, for bodies containing different degrees of heat”. ²² These differences cut most notably across the dividing line of gender, but also class, as male members of the lower classes were not considered citizens. Only free Greek-born men were citizens, and they “comprised never more than 15 to 20 percent of the total population, or half the adult male population”. Furthermore, “only a minority of those citizens possessed enough wealth to live leisurely, spending hour after hour, day after day among their fellow citizens, talking and debating: the leisure class composed from 5 to 10 percent of the citizenry”.²³ Although the agora — classic locus of democracy — was open to ‘all citizens’, only the dominant class controlled and used public space according to its own values and constitution.

In terms of gender, spatial segregation continues to shape our environments, including public spaces. As Leslie Kanes Weisman explains, “the acts of building and controlling space have been a male prerogative”, and architecture is a record of deeds done by those who have had the power to build. It is shaped by social, political and economic values embodied in the forms themselves and in the processes through which they are built and the manners in which they are used.²⁴

In terms of class, her view, from the perspective of architecture, corresponds in many ways with that of Pierre Bourdieu, who articulated the structures of class distinction in detail from the perspective of the social sciences. Writing on ‘the aristocracy of culture’, Bourdieu explains that differences between works are predisposed to express differences between authors, partly because in both style and content, they bear the mark of their authors’ socially constituted dispositions (that is, their social origins, retranslated as a function of the positions in the field of production which these dispositions played a large part in determining).²⁵

As is the case in architecture, the authors of such works have been mainly men — Kanes Weisman argues that the built environment resembles the environments suitable to these men’s own class and gender, or what could be called, in reference to Bourdieu, their ‘socially constituted dispositions’. For Bourdieu, mechanisms of power and domination “are largely reflected through symbolic means, that is, through culture”.²⁶ Architectural sociologist Garry Stevens explores the contributions that the production of architecture has made to culture, by way of codified or symbolic form. He explains that Bourdieu “strives to uncover the specific contribution that symbolic forms make to the construction of inequality by masking its political and economic roots”.27 Using Bourdieu’s concept of the field, Stevens explains that “the field of architecture is responsible for producing those parts of the built environment that the dominant classes use to justify their domination of the social order”.28 He elaborates on the relation between architecture and power by appealing to the professionally constituted ideas of practising architects who, according to him, must believe that their projects proceed in an aesthetic world, that they are indifferent to the games played in the field of power, that only artistic issues are at stake. But precisely by so doing, they most effectively produce the symbols that the dominants use to maintain their place at the top of the social order.²⁹

It follows that the visibility of groups who are not at the top of the social order is not considered a priority in privatised public spaces, where symbols of power and control strategies are devised and managed by and for those who own the space. That is, by powerful and affluent stakeholders, clients of powerful and affluent architects, landscape architects and urban designers. And for those who resemble them.

In this sense, the King’s Cross redevelopment project in London bears some similarities to the architectural design approach of the modern urban project, where highly recognised architects and planners “were fundamentally anti-urban in conceiving of the city as having a ‘natural’ predisposition to disorder that architecture and planning needed to address”.30 This was addressed by way of a ‘new’ formal code that appealed to the values and visions of their own professional/social group. However, the problem at the heart of the architecture practised by the most prominent architects of the modern movement, as Garry Stevens explains, is that “while they talked a lot about developing a functional architecture, a social architecture, an architecture for people to live in, they ended up with what the logic of the field demanded of them — a style, an aesthetic”.³¹ The modern aesthetic, which attempted “to remove grime and disorder from the urban environment”,³² resembles that delivered today by developers and managers via controlled maintenance labour.

In the King’s Cross of today, as Ben Campkin explains, [t]he distant industrial past has real estate value as heritage. Yet the more recent and ephemeral history of King’s Cross — a contested place, where creativity, charity, clubbing and queer culture appeared in the cracks of the ex-industrial cityscape — has disappeared under pristine developer-owner streets.³³

Describing the ‘clean-up’ campaign undertaken in King’s Cross in the early 1990s, Ben Campkin explains how police forces arrested many people, including sex workers, and reportedly caused the amount of drug dealing in the area to reduce significantly. “That does not mean, however, that entrenched social problems were dealt with effectively rather that their aim was, as one police officer put it, to make problems ‘disappear’”.³⁴ That is to say ‘reorganise’ the area, through adopting strategies that are similar to those that require what appears dirty to be cleaned. Here, it seems important to recall Mary Douglas’s description of dirt as “essentially disorder”.35 In her seminal book Purity and Danger, Douglas explains that “there is no such thing such as dirt; no single item is dirty apart from a particular system of classification in which it does not ft”.³⁶

In the case of King’s Cross, and particularly for this study, the practice of cleaning is examined at both a metaphoric level — understood as urban cleansing, a system of social classification — and a literal one, the actual act of removing dirt, as well as the mechanisms and protocols used for doing so at the scale of the urban plaza.

Performing: Alternative strategies to controlled visibility

As the research informing this book developed, the maintenance workers of King’s Cross, who are managed by King’s Cross Estate Services to clean the public areas, actively engaged with the research and contributed their own knowledge and skills to it. Their maintenance work allowed for the exploring of cleaning protocols through a series of controlled performances. The Disappearing Garden project paired architecture students and maintenance workers in a collaboration where maintenance and spatial practices merged, operating within the framework of Ukeles’s Maintenance Art. This collaboration aimed at attaining temporary visual, spatial and aesthetic agency for the labourers themselves, by recoding their cleaning routines through visually, aesthetically and culturally recognisable practices, such as drawing and choreography.

In Ukeles’s choreographed performances, groups of workers expertly operate the machines they work with daily, following synchronised group patterns created with colleagues in the form of a parade, a dance or a march. Ukeles worked on the premise that she would make the skills of these workers visible as cultural actions — to pop them out of a near universal feeling amongst sanitation workers where they did their work in public but, strangely, the public did not seem to see them, certainly not as persons with highly developed skills.³⁷

Maintenance workers, specifically cleaners and carers of domestic spaces in patriarchal structures of power, are mainly women, and are made less visible than men, in accordance to their lesser or plainly powerless circumstances. In contemporary practices, the visibility of maintenance labour has become an important theme, especially for feminist performance practices, with examples ranging from Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) to Ukeles’s Manifesto For Maintenance Art 1969! (1969) and her subsequent work on the subject. This book questions the visibility of maintenance workers in the context of public space, particularly Granary Square in London, where these workers and their labour become key means for controlling the space and communicating the kind of aesthetics and publics it is made for. The book follows the argument that maintenance can be regarded as spatial practice and, therefore, maintenance workers can be, and within this study are, considered co-authors of the space post-occupancy, even if their visibility continues to be largely suppressed.

BOOK

In Mending Privately Owned Public Spaces: Works on Taste and Spatial Practice (Routledge, 2025) architect and academic Adriana Cobo Corey questions the phenomenon of Privately Owned Public Spaces — or POPS — as a means to interrogate the subject of taste in architecture and urban design. Within the fields of architecture and urban design, high regard for specific urban regeneration projects with POPS at their heart tends to ignore their inherently divisive social impact. This book explores how successful POPS are sustained through, among other maintenance practices, carefully managed aesthetic codes, largely dependent on showcasing the value of highly controlled programmes of use.

BIO

Adriana Cobo Corey is an architect and academic with a doctorate in spatial practice. Her research interests cut across performance, taste and class in architecture, urban design and education. She is subject leader for Ethical Practice in Architecture across the department of Spatial Practices at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

NOTES

1 Hilary Sample, Maintenance Architecture (MIT Press, 2016), p. 161.

2 Hilary Sample, op.cit, p. 20.

3 Hilary Sample, op.cit, p. 7.

4 Hilary Sample, op.cit, pp. 14–15.

5 Shannon Mattern, ‘Maintenance and Care: A Working Guide to the Repair of Rust, Dust, Cracks, and Corrupted Code in Our Cities, Our Homes, and Our Social Relations.’, Places Journal, November 2018, p. 1

6 It is important to stress here that I am using the term innovation in the context of urban regeneration, to signal urban change giving priority to the construction of new city quarters.

7 Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designers Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (MIT Press, 2001), p. xvi.

8 Mark Wigley, op.cit, p. xvii. Quote taken from: Stephen Gardener, Le Corbusier (Viking Press, 1974), p. 40.

9 Mark Wigley, op.cit, p. xix.

10 Examples on housing as a prime modern architecture endeavour are prolific and well known. For instance, see Jurgen Joedicke, Weissenhofsiedlung Stuttgart (Stuttgart: Karl Kramer Verlag, 2000).

11 After giving birth, Ukeles asked her husband to take pictures of herself while doing chores: brushing her teeth, changing diapers, cooking, washing. These photographs became her first set of maintenance art works, expanding the field of art to include ordinary actions of maintenance and caring. Her series Seven Work Ballets (1983–2012), compiles works made with sanitation workers in seven different cities over the three decades that followed.

12 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Seven Work Ballets (Kunstverein Publishing and Steinberg Press, 2015), p. 74.

13 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 74.

14 Lefebvre, ibid.

15 Lefebvre, op.cit, p. 95.

16 See Campkin, Remaking London. Introduction, pp. 1–17.

17 Worpole and Greenhalgh, The Freedom of the City, p. 12. See: www.demos.co.uk.

18 Alex Schweder Performance Architecture, Rochus Urban Hinkel, Urban Interior, p. 131.

19 In Worpole and Greenhalgh, op.cit, p. 12. See: www.demos.co.uk.

20 See Aubin, C., Minguez Carrasco, C., Eds., Body Building: Architecture and Performance (Minneapolis: Performa, 2019); Ken Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, 1st ed. 1981 (Bureau of Public Secrets, US, 2007); Air Studio (https://airstudio.org/places/kings-cross) and David Roberts, ‘Make Public: Performing Public Housing in Erno Goldfnger’s Balfron Tower’, The Journal of Architecture 22, no. 1 (2017): 123–150.

21 Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (W. W. Norton, 1994), p. 34.

22 Richard Sennett, op.cit, p. 52.

23 Leslie K. Weisman, Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment (University of Illinois Press, 1994), p. 2.

24 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 11–12.

25 Garry Stevens, The Favored Circle, p. 48.

26 Garry Stevens, op.cit, p. 74.

27 Garry Stevens, op.cit, p. 86.

28 Garry Stevens, op.cit, pp. 87–88.

29 Ben Campkin, op.cit, p. 1.

30 Garry Stevens, op.cit, p. 95.

31 Campkin, op.cit, p. 1.

32 Campkin, op.cit, p. 125.

33 Campkin, op.cit, p. 119.

34 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, 1st ed. (London; New York: Routledge, 2002). Kindle edition. Loc 293.

35 Mary Douglas, op.cit., Kindle edition. Loc 210.

36 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Seven Work Ballets, p. 19.

37 Again, the lessons learned from this site-specific case study, can be transposed to construct and filter arguments when analysing POPS or iterations of public/private enterprises in the construction of public spaces elsewhere.