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Phd
Chargée de cours - Unité d'enseignement C

PhD student

Title : Home-made: architectural anthropology of home-based work in Switzerland in the postmodern era.

Dir. Sophie Delhay

Co-dir. Luca Pattaroni

Rooted in architectural anthropology, the research aims to study the spatial and social effects of home-based businesses (HBBs) development in contemporary Switzerland.

Since the 2000s, home-based work has expanded rapidly, driven by advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) and the emergence of the platform economy. These transformations have fostered new forms of employment including self-employed workers, « false self-employed » or uberised workers, permanent teleworkers –  profiles collectively classified by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) as home-based workers (employees who telework occasionally are excluded). In 2019, the International Labour Office estimated that there were 260 million home-based workers worldwide, the majority of whom were women. In response to the precarious conditions affecting these workers, the institution set a clear objective for the coming decades: to move from «invisible work» to «decent work.»

Focusing on the Swiss context - marked by a long tradition of home-based work in the watchmaking and textile industries - this thesis examines the contemporary diversity of home-based labour. Whether it involves the commodification of a hobby, an activity supplementing salaried employment, an informal and undeclared practice, a professional activity in its own right, or even a temporary solution while awaiting dedicated premises, home-based work disrupts conventional distinctions between the private and the public, the productive and the reproductive, and work and rest. It reconfigures domestic spatial practices, giving rise to what Anna Puigjaner terms the “diffuse house.” In this context, the home increasingly becomes a hybrid environment, both intimate and exposed, where productive, reproductive, and relational activities intersect. Although this hybridisation reflects an adaptive capacity in response to shifting work dynamics, it remains fundamentally embedded in a neoliberal trajectory characterised by the individualisation, flexibilisation, and privatisation of the place of production. At the same time, home-based work reshapes neighbourhood social structures. It challenges the prevailing model of the “productive city,” which advocates for a mixed-use urban fabric based on coarse granularity, and exposes its limitations. It shows that contemporary economic production is no longer confined to dedicated workspaces but has permeated the very fabric of everyday domestic life, operating at a very fine level of granularity.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the research explores both the causes and consequences of the relocation of work into the domestic sphere. While home-based work promises flexibility, time efficiency, reduced commuting and an improved work-life balance, these advantages remain ambivalent. They often come with significant costs for workers: professional isolation, blurred boundaries between private and professional life, increased spatial pressure on the most precarious households, reinforcement of gender inequalities and expansion of informal labour.

These sociological insights provide the basis for a renewed typological reading of housing in contemporary cities. The research highlights a tension between assignment and de-assignment of domestic spaces: while postmodern flexibility promotes spatial reversibility and adaptability, it simultaneously generates new forms of spatial precariousness. The study therefore seeks, on the one hand, to interrogate the typological ambiguity of contemporary « productive dwellings » -which combine adaptable and adapted spaces- and, on the other hand, to question the ongoing rehabilitation of former factories into mono-functionnal housing, despite the spatial potential of this industrial heritage, originally suited to production.

By critically examining the individualising paradigm of home-based work, the research contributes to reimagining the relationships between work, housing, and community. It advocates for placing solidarity, mixed uses, and the communal dimension of living at the core of architectural and urban design, thereby outlining the foundations of a more inclusive, shared, and resilient city in the face of contemporary transformations in work.