16.01.2023 | 18:00

Open Online Lecture Series within the BA/MA course “Taking Care! On Spaces of Reproduction“, coordinated and organised by AM Claudia Nitsche

Prof. Dr. Gabu Heindl: “Working Women Rooming – So many urgent issues for egalitarian housing“

In 1927, architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, soon to become engaged in communist politics, planned prototypes of an 'Apartment for Working Women': 'Type I' of this apartment consisted of very small living spaces for 'working-class women' who had to share bathrooms, while 'Type IV' was intended for 'academics, higher officials, teachers', and – as if this was a logical consequence – this latter housing type was a single apartment five times larger than those designed for ordinary workers. As much as the architect strove for proletarian emancipation and agendas, by bringing women's issues to the foreground, with this prototypical design, she confirmed the immutability of presupposed class attributions; which meant that educationally privileged women, part of the employed middle class, were eligible to more space than working-class women.

Schütte-Lihotzky became part of the international CIAM architectural group, which in 1929 was concerned with creative solutions for "housing for the Existenzminimum” (subsistence level) – without, however, politically criticizing the unjust distribution of wage and space underlying the task.

Today, the precariousness of women* has changed, but not decreased and housing and living conditions of women* are ever more shaped by social power relations. A large number of women* who live alone and/or are single parents are poor or at risk of poverty. They are poor despite working ("working poor"). And housing makes them even poorer: women* pay proportionally more of their income (if they have one at all) or of their pension for housing than men. Many women* work as low-paid or unpaid workers, while being system-maintaining care workers and care takers of our cities.

The lecture aims at intersectional and queer feminist approaches in contemporary housing activism and politics today."

Gabu Heindl (PhD): Professor for Architecture Cities Economies at University Kassel, Unit Master at AA, London. Head of GABU Heindl Architecture | Urbanism, Vienna. Studied at Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Geidai University, Tokyo, Princeton University (Fulbright Scholar). 2013-2017 Chairwoman of Austrian Society for Architecture (ÖGFA). Co-Editor of Building Critique. Architecture and its Discontent (Leipzig, 2019), author of Stadtkonflikte. Radikale Demokratie in Architektur und Stadtplanung (Vienna, 2020), and Gerechte Stadt muss sein! (Vienna, 2022). She has been planning, building, lecturing and publishing in the realm of the housing question and contemporary pressures upon public space in local and global, academic and activist contexts. www.gabuheindl.at  

Zugang via Zoom: https://abk-stuttgart-de.zoom.us/j/68177674568?pwd=dWFUSFJwc0U3OUFMT0JVaGMzeEozUT09
Meeting-ID: 681 7767 4568
Kenncode: uxAaf5