1. INTRODUCTION
The social distancing measures and lockdowns prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic urged millions of people to work at home (ILO 2020). These circumstances sparked interest in investigating the spatial and material dimensions of the home as a place of work. During this time, architecture and geography scholars virtually entered workers’ homes to investigate how people experienced the lockdowns, moved around their homes and utilised its spatial affordances to accommodate work (Marco et al. 2022). Others studied the spatial qualities of the sites where makeshift homeworking environments were arranged (Cuerdo-Vilches et al. 2021; McGee et al. 2023): the ‘living infrastructures’ that sustained and enabled the ‘working body’ to work from home, from heating to food services (Lewis et al. 2024); and how these newly made homeworkers managed the times-spaces of the home with other household members (Orman et al. 2024; Yue et al. 2025).
Other research, however, highlighted the injustices that convene at the intersection of work and space during the pandemic. For instance, whereas some employees, whose work could not be performed from home, were forced to continue working at their employer’s premises at the risk of their health (Falade et al. 2021; Smith 2023), others were forced to work from home at the risk of being subjected to domestic violence (Viero et al. 2021). While these situations raised the popular consciousness about these injustices, what remains obscured is that the home has always been an important space of work (Holliss 2015), and it has constantly been a site of injustices (Mies 1982).
Much research focuses on injustices associated with work at home (Chung et al. 2021; Lake & Maidment 2023; Mazumdar 2018; Mies 1982). However, in these studies the role of space in engendering these injustices is tacit. Inversely, the growing body of research that investigates the spatial dimension of work at home barely hints at the multiple associated injustices (Cuerdo-Vilches et al. 2021; Holliss 2012; Lewis et al. 2024; Orman et al. 2024). The present study brings different research together to explore the ground where home, space, work and injustice intersect. Drawing on the concept of spatial justice as an analytical tool, the aim is to understand how injustices manifest in space and the role of space in engendering and perpetuating injustices related to working at home.
The paper is structured as follows. The next section introduces the conceptual framework. This is followed by the research methods. The findings are then presented and discussed in relation to the diverse ways in which working at home and the home as a space of work produce spatial injustices. The paper ends with suggestions for how architects and planners can advance justice through their work.
2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
2.1 (IN)JUSTICE
There are multiple conceptualisations of justice (Harvey 1992). Liberal conceptualisations view justice as fairness, conveying:
the idea that the principles of justice are agreed to in an initial situation that is fair.
Referred to as the distributive justice, this theory focuses on individuals and outcomes and questions ‘how social benefits should be allocated amongst members of society’ (Young 1990: 74). However, it has been critiqued as being too narrow, restrictive, individualistic and confused, because not all matters of justice can be addressed in distributive terms (Harvey 1975; Young 1990).
Not dismissing the importance of fair distribution, critical conceptualisations of justice propose the concepts of oppression and domination—injustice—as starting points to conceptualise justice (Young 1990). This concept of justice focuses on outcomes and individuals as well as processes and institutions (Soja 2010). Young (1990: 37) argues that social justice should be concerned:
with the degree to which a society contains and supports the institutional conditions necessary for the realisation
of the values of a good life, which include:
developing and exercising one’s capacities and expressing one’s experience and participating in determining one’s actions and the conditions of one’s actions.
Injustices represent the institutional constraint of self-development through oppression and of self-determination via domination (Young 1990). In short, social justice means ‘the elimination of institutionalised oppression and domination’ (Young 1990: 15).
According to Young (1990) there are five faces of oppression. These include, exploitation, which refers to the transfer of power from one group to another whereby the former: ‘exercises their capacities under the control, according to the purposes, and for the benefit’ of the latter (Young 1990: 40).
Exploitation is also a gender and a racial struggle consisting of the ‘systematic and unreciprocated transfer of power from women to men’ and/or from one racial group to another (Young 1990: 50).
Next, marginalisation represents the expulsion of a whole group of people from useful and full participation in social life and ‘in conditions of social cooperation’, thus depriving them of the material:
cultural, practical, and institutional conditions for exercising their capacities in a context of recognition and interaction.
Third, powerlessness implicates the:
draining away of any sense of political power, participation, representation, and capacity for self-expression based on class, race, gender, or any other human attribute.
Cultural imperialism:
involves the universalisation of a dominant group’s experience and culture, and its establishment as a norm
Violence:
relates to the social behaviour and institutional practices that tolerate or even encourage violent acts as acceptable parts of daily life, raising danger for certain individuals and groups.
2.2 SPATIAL (IN)JUSTICE
While several concepts linking justice and space have been developed (Davies 1969; Fainstein 2019; Harvey 1975; Lefebvre 1996), Soja (2009) argues that the concept of ‘spatial justice’ better emphasises ‘the spatial and geographical aspects of’ (in)justice. In his view, there is always a spatial dimension to (in)justice but one must also apply ‘critical spatial thinking’ to address such dimension.
Lefebvre (1991) played an important role in conceptualising space—critical spatial thinking—and the spatial dimension of injustice. He posited that all societies, with their modes and relations of production, produce a space and that space must be understood more than as a material inert container. Space is also something relational, full of meaning and ideological. Thus, space is at once ‘the material product of social relations [and] a manifestation of relations’ (Gottdiener 1994: 130). Moreover, Lefebvre argued that space reflects social relations but also affects such relations; space may reflect hegemonic power but also serves as a conduit to exert power. Space, thus, has a dialectical feature (Dikeç 2001); it is at once product and medium. Dikeç (2001) makes the case that spatial justice is a way to understand how social injustices become spatialised (in form and process) and the way in which space serves to produce and sustain social injustices. He calls this the ‘spatial dialectics of injustice’ (Dikeç 2001: 1787).
To understand spatial injustices related to working at home, critical spatial thinking can be applied to understand the home as simultaneously an ideological construct and a material space. As an ideology, it is constructed through the values, meanings and beliefs any given society associates to it. However, these will be materialised in the spaces of the home (Blunt 2005: 507). If these are unjust, they will be reflected in unjust material and immaterial spatial formations at home and beyond.
Key features of spatial justice include (Shucksmith et al. 2021; Soja 2009):
the spatial distribution of—and access to—social benefits and socially valued resources as a condition necessary for the realisation of the values of a good life; and
the processes of spatial formation and production that generate and consolidate unjust distributional patterns and unequal social relations—such as locational discrimination based on class, race and gender, the creation of core–periphery spatial structures, and geographical uneven development—which hinder the realisation of the values of a good life.
This study explores the spatial dialectics of injustice, and the key spatial injustice features as they relate to the home as a space of work.
3. METHODS
This study is based on the analysis of academic qualitative and quantitative studies, the grey literature, and reports from different strands of research conducted by scholars from the fields of architecture, urban planning, transport and mobility studies, and political sciences. Table 1 illustrates the search terms per disciplinary field.
Table 1
Literature search strings and databases organised by topic/disciplines.
| TOPIC | DATABASE(S) | SEARCH STRING | EXCLUSION CRITERIA |
|---|---|---|---|
| Architecture (general) | Andor, Google Scholar, Scopus | (‘home-based work’ OR ‘work from home’ OR ‘WFH’ OR ‘working from home’ OR ‘home-based working’ OR ‘work at home’) AND (Architect*) | ‘Computer Science’ |
| Urban planning (access to nature) | Andor, Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scopus | (Work AND Home OR living OR housing OR ‘third spaces’ OR ‘locationless work’ OR ‘digital space’ OR ‘home-workplace’ OR ‘home-workspace’ OR ‘home workplace environment’ OR ‘Telecommuters’ OR ‘residential environment’ OR ‘home working environment’ OR ‘home office’ OR ‘sheltering-in-place’ OR ‘WFH’) AND (Digital OR ‘e-work’ OR ‘tele-work’ OR mobile OR remote OR hybrid) AND (Nature OR green* OR courtyard* Or forest* OR lake* Or garden* OR tree* OR park* OR patio* OR terrace* OR balcon*) AND (Motivation* OR incentive* OR reason* OR condition* OR explanation* OR well-being) | ‘Nature of work’ |
| Transport and mobility | Transport Research Board, Scopus | (mobility OR transport* Or transit OR tourism OR travel) AND (Home OR living OR hous* OR third spaces OR digital space OR ‘summer cottage’) AND (‘digital work’ OR ‘e-work’ OR ‘tele-work’ OR ‘remote work’ OR ‘hybrid work’ OR ‘work from home’ OR ‘WFH’ OR ‘locationless work’) AND (socio-economic OR gender OR sexuality OR ethnicity OR disadvantaged OR marginali* OR class OR demographic* OR accessibil* OR disability OR minority) | |
| Political sciences | ProQuest, Sage Journals, Google Scholar | (‘remote work’ OR ‘work from home’ OR ‘home-based work’ OR ‘telework’) AND (culture OR built environment OR land use OR history OR labour OR capitalism) |
Inclusion criteria: the language was set to English, no date range was set and the information was searched through all sources, including books, articles, conference papers and magazines. Subsequently, between the different fields, researchers wrote summary reports based on key findings from the literature, discussed amongst themselves, and interpreted these through spatial justice lenses. From this interpretation, four key themes emerged, which will be discussed in the following section.
To explore the key features and dialectics of spatial injustice, Table 2 was developed based on Young’s five faces of oppression against which to map spatial (in)justices related to working at home from the literature and along two main themes: (A) the features of spatial (in)justice related to work at home and the home as a space of work; and (B) the spatial dialectics of injustice.
Table 2
Key issues of spatial injustice in terms of (A) process and distribution and (B) the spatial dialectics of injustice.
| A. FEATURES OF SPATIAL (IN)JUSTICE RELATED TO WORK AT HOME AND THE HOME AS A SPACE OF WORK | |
|---|---|
| A1. PROCESSES OF SPATIAL FORMATION AND PRODUCTION THAT GENERATE AND CONSOLIDATE UNJUST DISTRIBUTIONAL PATTERNS AND UNEQUAL SOCIAL RELATIONS | A2. SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION AND ACCESS TO BENEFITS AND SOCIALLY VALUED RESOURCES |
The home, an ideological and material space, is the product of a historical process that separated work and home; divided work into productive and reproductive work, gendered this work, and valued it differently; positioned reproductive work at home, feminised this work and the home, and ideologically positioned the home in the private sphere. This process of spatial formation shaped the home as a space of non-work with justice implications, where the home becomes:
| Some types of work at home are associated with higher wages and mobility possibilities, thus generating unequal spatial distributional patterns of and access to:
|
| B. SPATIAL DIALECTICS OF INJUSTICE | |
| B1. SOCIAL INJUSTICES BECOME SPATIALISED | B2. SPACE SERVES TO PRODUCE AND SUSTAIN SOCIAL INJUSTICES |
| The processes that led to contemporary homes to be defined and designed as spaces of non-work led to social injustices becoming spatialised in the home (see A1). The feminisation of social reproductive work, its devaluation and exploitation, and the social inequalities that underpin this work (e.g. outsourced paid domestic work) becomes spatialised, e.g. so-called maid’s and servant’s rooms, without good qualitative living standards. Because productive work at home reproduces work-related inequalities, some types of productive work, typically forms of work that enable flexible worker mobility (e.g. telework), are better remunerated than others. These inequalities become spatialised in the form of:
| Due to its atomism and being positioned in the so-called private sphere, the home serves to produce and sustain injustices:
|
4. FINDINGS
Across the different fields of research covering the micro-scale of the home to the larger scale of cities, four key themes emerged: (1) that the home has been shaped as a space of non-work; (2) the home is a space of invisible, devalued and gendered work; (3) the architecture of the home is not shaped for work; and (4) working at home shapes unequal urban formations and access to quality living environments. These themes are discussed in more detail below.
4.1 SHAPING THE HOME AS A PRIVATE SPACE OF NON-WORK
As Lefebvre noted, space is shaped by societies’ ideologies and values. When these are unjust, then these will be reflected in unjust spatial formations, which will, in turn, shape and/or reinforce unequal social relations. A stark idea that shapes the home is that it is a space of non-work. This idea follows a historical process that has made the home an unjust spatial formation that reproduces, reflects and reinforces existing social injustices.
Contemporary societies in the Global North associate the home with leisure, intimacy, and rest and recovery from work, but not for work itself (Bauhardt 1997; Fraser 1985, 2016; Hayden 1982; Weisman 1994). Notwithstanding, before industrial capitalism, work was practiced at and around the home, and equitably between men and women (Holliss 2015). During the transition towards industrial capitalism, home and work were ‘mentally and physically separated’ (Holliss 2012), and paid productive work was positioned elsewhere, i.e. in factories, workshops, bureaucratic buildings and ports, but apparently not at home.
Industrialisation also fostered a crisis of social reproduction.1 To deal with this crisis, work was separated into work of social reproduction and of economic production, whereby the former was defined as women’s work and remunerated with the ‘coin of “love”’, and the latter as men’s work compensated with money (Fraser 2016). To Fraser (2016), this separation led to the subordination of women to men and the exploitation of women’s work.
The separation of work into two categories and the physical and mental separation of home and work contributes to the foundation of the private and public spheres: the former associated with domesticity and non-work and the latter with work and public life (Bauhardt 1997). Moreover, the private domestic sphere became a feminised space—the space for women—whereas the public sphere became the space where men go out to work (Bauhardt 1997; Fraser 2016). In this process, the home, women and the (unpaid) work of social reproduction/care are positioned in the private domestic sphere. Through this move, the important work of social reproduction/care is obscured, devalued and exploited, despite being fundamental for economic productive work and society’s survival. This has led some feminist scholars to describe the home as a ‘key patriarchal site of labour-surplus extraction and struggle’ (Mezzadri 2023: 111).
Despite being considered a space of non-work, the home continued to be an important space of economic productive and social reproductive work. However, this work and the worker within are starkly invisible. The following section brings work at home and the worker to the fore.
4.2 THE HOME AS A SPACE FOR INVISIBLE, DEVALUED AND GENDERED WORK
Although imagined as a space of non-work, in 2019, it was estimated that home-based workers represented approximately 8% of paid global employment (Bonnet et al. 2021). This percentage does not account for remote workers working from home, informal work (no global statistics available; Bonnet et al. 2021) or unpaid work of social reproduction/care work undertaken at home. If these were considered, the number of individuals working at home would be statistically much higher.
Approximately 57% of homeworkers globally are women (Bonnet et al. 2021). Because working at home alleviates geographical and spatial confinement, it can represent a path for women bound to their homes—for whichever reason—to participate in work life, earn wages and advance their emancipation (ILO 2021). Pregnant women could be employed longer and have more financial stability and independence from their partners (Plaut 2004). It can help close the over-education gap (Laegran 2008; Santiago-Vela & Mergener 2022), a matter that overwhelmingly affects women (ILO 2021). It might be the only option for some women to work, especially in parts of the world that outright forbid them from working outside their homes (ILO 2021). Whatever the reason for working at home, much of the work that therein unfolds is invisible, often leading to its devaluation and unchecked exploitation.
Designating the home as a space of non-work positioned in the feminised private sphere obscures the unpaid work of social reproduction/care undertaken at home. This work is strongly dependent on women, who:
dedicate 4 hours and 25 minutes per day on unpaid care work compared with 1 hour and 23 minutes for men.
Feminist critique how capitalist societies have naturalised this as women’s work and defined it as a ‘labour of love’ to extract it for free, devaluing it despite fundamentally depending on it (Cox & Federici 1975).
As more women enter the workforce and families are comprised of two-wage earners, the work of social reproduction has been outsourced, usually to women of poor and/or racialised backgrounds, in the form of waged domestic work (Bauhardt 2019). According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), domestic work represents 1.7% of total employment worldwide and 90% of domestic workers globally are women (ILO 2013). Sometimes domestic workers reside in the employer’s residence (live-in domestic work and au pairs), and while it may represent a source of employment to many women, working and living at the employer’s home isolates and positions them in vulnerable situations. Studies suggest that live-in domestic workers are subject to exploitation, working for long hours a day, are sometimes coerced to work and may be subject to diverse forms of violence, from verbal, physical and sexual abuse to rape by their employers (ILO 2013).
Also, waged productive work can be invisible and devalued when positioned at home, especially if undertaken by women. Mazumdar (2018: 29) illustrated how the beedi industry in India went into a ‘downward informal spiral’ when manufacturing moved from factories to homes and from an industry once powered by men to one powered by women who, in 2018, accounted for 70% of the workforce (Mazumdar 2018).2 To some, this shift from men- to women-powered work and transferring work to workers’ homes is a strategy to define the female homeworker as housewife and their work as household work or hobbies, despite generating profits that fuel the global economy (Mies 1982). Feminist scholar Maria Mies developed the concept of housewifisation to describe a process whereby:
women are socially defined as ‘housewives’, dependent for their sustenance on the income of a husband, irrespective of whether they are defacto housewives or not. […] It leads to defining the bulk of women’s work as non-work and hence open to unrestricted exploitation.
Though a debated concept (Prügl 1996), housewifisation contains a subliminal spatial undertone that suggests a process which positions a gendered person (the wife) in a space (the house) for their (physical and psychological) exploitation, illustrating the role of space in producing and sustaining gendered injustices.
However, it is not only women’s work at home which can be invisible and exploited. Studies suggest that positioning productive work in workers’ homes is a worldwide strategy to lower costs (e.g. infrastructures, utilities), push down wages and to keep employees dispersed, thereby impairing the possibility for unionising and creating networks of solidarity to fight for more just working conditions (Braesemann et al. 2022; Carr et al. 2000; Mies 1982). Moreover, as economies in the Global North deindustrialise and work becomes more digitalised, industrial home-based work is being repositioned in workers’ homes in the Global South (Hofmeester & Linden 2017; Wrigley-Asante & Mensah 2017), further pushing work at home into the shadows, contributing to global spatial injustices, a matter that cannot be addressed within the scope of this paper.
The home not only makes invisible the worker within, but also the material and immaterial conditions under which they work. This is explored in the following section, which examines how the invisibility of work at home is reflected in the architecture of the home and how this compounds spatial injustices.
4.3 THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE HOME NOT SHAPED FOR WORK
Home geographer Alison Blunt argues that:
domestic architecture and design are inscribed with meanings, values, and beliefs that both reflect and reproduce ideas about gender, class, sexuality, family and nation.
Thus, the idea that the home is a space of non-work has determined ‘the way housing has been conceived, designed, and inhabited for the last 150 years’ (Giudici 2018: 1). Moreover, contemporary homes have usually been designed for an abstract, homogeneous, heteronormative nuclear family and compartmentalised into illusory monofunctional spaces (Giudici 2018). Continuing to design homes in this way further obscures the multiplicity of functions of the home and the diverse activities, including work, that unfold within.
The failure to take work into account in contemporary housing design can be conducive to spatial injustices in the form unequal access to spaces that support work, workers’ wellbeing, and the wellbeing and health of all household members. Many homes lack adequate conditions for industrial work (e.g. textile, garment, jewellery industries) (Ahmad et al. 2024; Goodwin et al. 2023). Homeworkers in these industries tend to receive lower wages than self-employed professionals, white- and pink-collar teleworkers, and digital platform workers (Bonnet et al. 2021), and are less likely to afford proper housing where work–life and home–life can co-inhabit under one roof.3 Better quality of living space is statistically associated with households with a higher socio-economic status and financial stability (Cuerdo-Vilches et al. 2021), and during the pandemic lockdowns these home-based workers were the ones who suffered most economically (Bonnet et al. 2021). Yet, many industrial homeworkers require a large space to fit their tools and/or product of their work (Goodwin et al. 2023), and some might handle toxic materials (e.g. jewellery workers), therefore requiring spaces that are physically separated from the rest of the home (Ahmad et al. 2024; Ferreira et al. 2019).
The lack of physical boundaries within the home can affect how homeworkers balance between their productive work and reproductive/care work (Nisonen et al. 2025; Orman et al. 2024; Wapshott & Mallett 2012). Many studies conducted during the pandemic revealed how the lack of boundaries generated tensions between household members and complicated balancing between unpaid care work and productive work, disproportionately affecting working women more than men (Orman et al. 2024). In extreme cases, the lack of adequate home-working space and the boundaries and infrastructures required to care for the ‘working body’ can impact the health and wellbeing of homeworkers and their families (Ahmad et al. 2024; Lewis et al. 2024).
The architecture of the home can also reproduce social injustices through spatial design decisions. This is well exemplified in a study about the maid’s room/servant’s room, which enquired into praised architectural projects of renowned architects to illustrate how architectural culture idealises their projects but omit to visualise live-in domestic workers and discuss ‘the spatial constraints imposed on [live-in] domestic workers within their modern designs’ (Duarte Rodríguez & Quintero González 2024: 38). They showed how these spaces often lack natural light and ventilation, might be used as a storage room or be placed outside the structure of the main house. To Duarte Rodríguez & Quintero González (2024: 38) these rooms represent the ‘reproduction of oppressive architectural typologies’.
Spatial policies of the home can also generate injustices. In the UK, policies were:
expressly designed to discourage home-based work and managed through tenancy agreements that prohibited it.
These strategies were directed towards social housing, which affected low-income homeworkers. Notwithstanding, these failed to discourage working at home and, rather, fostered its clandestinity; homeworkers were pushed to work in spaces that were even more inadequate for work (Holliss 2015).
Studies into ‘house industries’ have described these as ‘diffuse factories’ that connect ‘atomised workers’ with an ‘invisible assembly line’ (Mies 1982), depicting an important characteristic of the home that enables the exploitation, marginalisation and powerlessness of homeworkers: its atomism. In being designed and constructed as spatially dispersed nuclei, homes separate homeworkers from each other and from societal view. This can affect their sense of isolation, which can be detrimental for their wellbeing (Kannan & Veazie 2023), and hinder the possibility for social encounters indispensable to unite and seek better working conditions.
All the above illustrates how architectural design and spatial policies produce, reproduce and may perpetuate spatial injustices.
4.4 WORKING AT HOME SHAPES UNEQUAL URBAN FORMATIONS AND ACCESS TO QUALITY LIVING ENVIRONMENTS
The mental and physical separation of work and home catalysed during industrialisation in Europe and the US led to the modernist planning ideals of the 20th century, which fragmented cities into residential, industrial, educational and retail single-use zones (Bauhardt 1997). This fragmentation reinforces the mental separation between work and home and the invisibility of work at home. Despite its invisibility, working at home shapes cities, often leading to the unequal distribution of, and access to, qualitative work–living environments and exacerbates unequal social relations.
While globally, most home-based workers are located in rural areas, in the Global North, most are located in urban areas. Moreover, the most common home-based occupations in the Global North include professional and technicians (47%), services and sales (19%), managers (10%), and crafts and trades (8%) (Bonnet et al. 2021). Home-based workers in the first three categories usually receive higher wages than individuals performing industrial home-based work, and usually their main tools of work are personal electronic devices.
The rise of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has made possible more flexible working arrangements (Davies 2021).4 For example, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, this flexibility became widely adopted allowing for more worker mobility and contributing to the redistribution of the workforce from urban to rural areas and from densely populated areas to less dense ones (Mariotti et al. 2023).
Because some forms of work allow less flexible mobility (e.g. industrial work) than others (e.g. telework), work at home is not evenly distributed across cities. Studies have illustrated how often industrial homeworkers (usually women from foreign countries) live–work in city cores, while teleworkers move to the suburbs to work from their homes, resulting in the ‘exit’ of knowledge workers from urban centres towards the periphery (Moos & Skaburskis 2007). This contributes to suburbanisation and urban sprawl, changes the demography of urban centres and exacerbates social segregation (Karasu 2021; OECD 2023; Zenkteler et al. 2022).
Access to nature and its benefits is a decisive factor in the selection of a place to settle, particularly for knowledge workers, digital nomads and lifestyle migrants who can work from home but desire to move outside of large cities to avoid mental distress and regain agency over the choice of place of residence (Ria-Maria 2023). Contact with nature and green and blue environments have been shown to have health and restorative benefits and increase mental and physical wellbeing (Kondo et al. 2018; Nilsson et al. 2011). However, the opportunity to access nature and its restorative benefits is often limited to a handful of homeworkers who can afford to move to greener urban environments, since workers’ mobility capabilities might be hindered by their socio-economic status and the type of work undertaken (Skärbäck 2007).
Additionally, because urban sprawl usually extends the travel time required to access necessary services, it unleashes other issues with spatial justice implications. Studies have found that telecommuters tend to travel for other purposes: to escape ‘cabin fever’ and engage in civic activities (Caldarola & Sorrell 2022), to utilise freed-up time for leisure activities (Rafiq et al. 2022), and to commit to non-work-related daily trips that used to be combined with commuting (Kim et al. 2015). This usually entails the increase of privately owned vehicles and long-distance travel, increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (Wu et al. 2022) and may decrease public transport availability (Kakar & Prasad 2020), disproportionately affecting poorer communities (Brehm & Pellow 2022). Furthermore, GHG emissions contribute to the climate emergency (IPCC 2023), thus exacerbating climate injustices (Brehm & Pellow 2022).
5. DISCUSSION
The findings illustrated that the home has been historically, ideologically and materially shaped as a private feminised space of non-work. In industrial and post-industrial societies, this has led to work at home becoming invisible—particularly the work of social reproduction, overwhelmingly done by women and at home—devaluing the work that therein unfolds, and to separating and isolating homeworkers. This creates the fertile ground for the exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness and violence of homeworkers. The findings also demonstrated that the architecture of the home reproduces social injustices in the spaces of the home and exacerbates these by designing homes without the adequate conditions for many types of work, especially industrial work, which affects homeworkers of lower economic backgrounds the most. Moreover, the study showed that different work-at-home types enable or hinder workers’ mobility and possibility to seek better work–home conditions creating unequal distributional patterns and spatial formations, such as suburbanisation, and exacerbating inequalities.
However, important limitations to this study have to be acknowledged. The first pertains to the concept of spatial justice and the lack of a coherent definition and fine-grained frameworks to guide the analytical process. To guide the process, the study used Young’s five phases of oppression to recognise injustices and developed a table to visualise key issues of spatial (in)justice drawn from the literature in terms of (1) process and distribution and (2) the spatial dialectics of injustice (Table 2). This theoretical contribution can now serve for future research to build on and further develop.
The second limitation of the study pertains to the method. Being based solely on a literature review, the study can only provide a wide, but surface-level, overview of the injustices associated with working at home. Interdisciplinary and in-depth qualitative research can better contextualise and deepen the understanding of the injustices that shape the home as a space of work. Nevertheless, in being comprised of literature from diverse disciplines allowed this surface-level overview to grasp different spatial scales and spatial issues that relate to the home as a space of work and the spatial justice implications as synthesised in Table 2. Furthermore, drawing from such a vast and multidisciplinary literature repertoire helped elucidated the porosity of the home, demonstrating that, despite being ideologically positioned in the private sphere, through work, the home is opened to the political public sphere, as feminists have long pointed out (Cox & Federici 1975; Fraser 1985; Mies 1982). As such, the home is opened to societal scrutiny to avoid and address injustices, including work-related ones.
The third limitation relates to the lack of consistency within the literature and statistical data regarding the use of terms such as ‘remote work’, ‘telework’, ‘working from home’, ‘working at home’ and ‘home-based work’, which are often used interchangeably and without proper definition. This obscures the true number of individuals conducting work at home and the types of work that are really taking place there with spatial justice implications. For example, when both telework and industrial home-based work are statistically subsumed under the category working from home, then the differences between both, in terms of the type of work, spatial needs and worker characteristics, are obscured and cannot be properly analysed. Moreover, most studies focused either on waged productive work or on unpaid reproductive/care work. Seldom were these considered in relation to the other, and in the case of productive work at home, most studies focused on telework. More in-depth research must be conducted to unearth and visualise the diverse types of paid and unpaid work that take place at home, often simultaneously, to understand how these two starkly intertwine and truly shape the home as a space of work.
6. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE
To avoid reproducing spatial injustices related to work at home, spatial planners and designers can start by reconceptualising and reimaging the home as a ‘hybrid work–dwelling assemblage’ (Lewis et al. 2024: 6) and work together to make work at home visible, enable work at home, recognise the porosity of the home, and ensure access to high-quality work–home and natural environments.
One way to make work visible and enable work at home is by diversifying land-use and building typologies. This can allow different types of amenities and services to be in proximity to homeworkers, including supermarkets, libraries, co-working spaces, community rooms and other third spaces which can support their work (directly and indirectly) and serve as spaces of encounter and conviviality. This also allows diverse and affordable working facilities to be planned near homes to avoid suburbanisation and urban sprawl and the inclusion of nature and recreational green and blue infrastructures near work–homes. However, these must be accessible and affordable to all homeworkers, regardless of age, class, gender, race and type of work.
Diversifying land use can also promote the design of a more diversified housing types that are better suited to support work at home, as opposed to housing-only buildings. Such reconceptualised housing types should be designed to be able to accommodate different types of work, from telework to industrial work, recognising the diverse spatial needs of the various forms of (productive/reproductive) work. Moreover, these must consider that the home is a space where many activities beside work unfold, often simultaneously, and that the home is, at once, a space for (productive/reproductive) work and for rest and recovery from work. This implies understanding the different spatial temporalities of the home and seeking design strategies that foster a harmonious relationship and transition between the work of social reproduction/care and economic production and that ensure the safety and wellbeing of all co-inhabitants.
Designing cities and housing with work at home in mind requires understanding the spatial needs of different types of homeworkers, not only teleworkers, and the health and environmental implications of their work. This understanding could be developed through participatory processes that give voice and agency to homeworkers to shape their homes as spaces of work and be another way to make work at home and the worker within visible.
Notes
[1] The concept of reproductive work refers to all the activities needed for the social reproduction of productive waged labour to sustain and reproduce the workforce and the capitalist mode of production, such as child-rearing, educating and socialising children (Bauhardt 2019).
[3] White-collar work refers to a type of work that requires mental rather than physical effort and can be done in office settings (Cambridge Dictionary 2025b). Pink-collar work refers to work that has been predominantly undertaken by women (Cambridge Dictionary 2025a).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors thank Christine Bauhardt, Raúl Castaño de la Rosa and Jaana Vanhatalo for commenting on earlier versions of this paper. They also acknowledge Anna Kobierska for helping to organise some of the material for this manuscript.
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
D.M.B.: Corresponding and main author; made a substantial contribution to the conception and design of the research and the acquisition, analysis and interpretation of the data for the work. J.L.: Made a substantial contribution to the acquisition, analysis and interpretation of the data and contributed to the drafting of the manuscript. H.S.: Made a substantial contribution to the design of data acquisition and contributed to the interpretation of the data and drafting of the manuscript. O.I.: Made a substantial contribution to the design of data acquisition and contributed to the interpretation of the data and drafting of the manuscript. S.P.: Made a substantial contribution to the conception and design of the research and contributed to the drafting of the manuscript. E.N.: Contributed to the interpretation of the data and drafting of the manuscript.
COMPETING INTERESTS
The authors have no competing interests to declare. Sofie Pelsmakers is a member of the Buildings & Cities editorial board, but had no role in, and no influence on, the review and editorial decision processes.