Custodians of the City

Abstract

<p>What is the place in architectural history for the custodians of the city—those who care, guard, and repair buildings, streets, parks, public spaces, and infrastructures? Recent scholarship on the global mobilities of labor has attended to the gendered and racial politics of professionals and experts, sparked renewed analyses on postcolonial histories of architecture and expanded our understanding of agents beyond the global north. However, from building construction to occupation and maintenance, the routine labor of custodians who keep the city running daily—sanitation workers, maintenance workers, security guards, and domestic workers—fade into the background. Their housing and workspaces are residual or liminal spaces subservient to those they maintain. These custodians are often migrants, undocumented workers, or day laborers with precarious status. Nevertheless, their custodial work is crucial to uphold state agendas, corporate interests, and our conveniences. </p><p><br></p><p>By centering custodians and their work, we question existing methodological approaches to architectural history that rely on primary sources and archival records. Archives reflect dominant power structures of their times and either exclude or stage the mundane work of routine maintenance, obscuring regimes of discipline and violence. How do we read against the grain of existing accounts to recover the agency of custodial work in shaping the environment? What positionality do researchers assume when tracing such processes, relationships, and spaces? We seek papers that go beyond the post-colonial critiques of subjectivities and post-war discourses of transnational expertise to foreground the bodies and spaces that perform custodial work to maintain the everyday functions of the city. We are interested in how systemic exclusion produces spatial practices, domestic spaces, rest and leisure spaces, or workspaces occupied by the custodians of the built environment. Importantly, we seek contributions that explore the interplay between the maintained spaces, service spaces, and the politics that enable them. </p>