Socio-Spatial Laundry Landscapes1
Cleaning clothes is one of the primal and essential needs of people. This everyday, trivial and hence infraordinary procedure has produced ever-changing socio-spatial landscapes and urban environments. Historically, one can draw a division between washing your clothes yourself and getting someone else to do it for you, producing two parallel realities, which will be explained in the following part of the paper.
1 Based on the journal article: Espen Lunde Nielsen ‘Urban Function of the Infraordinary: Dry Cleaners as Social Vertexes’, Spaces and Flows: An International Journal of Urban and ExtraUrban Studies, 8 (2016), 57–67
Short Detour on the History of Cleaning Clothes ‘American Odyssey: A Monday Washing, New York City’. The laundry lines become a shared infraordinary spectacle and signify the internal life of the buildings.
The first of these two realities takes its origin in the essential need for water: women washing and drying at the local riverside or near watercourses. This was a public event and often performed as a group. The clothes were dried and dyed by the sun on ‘bleach fields,’ producing spectacular landscapes of people’s personal items. Thereafter, washhouses emerged (by law in France from 1851) that became known as ‘gossip houses’ of the cities, where women would exchange stories, informal reflections, and everyday experiences during the hard labour of washing clothes. In addition to the small and basic backyard washhouses, many modern versions emerged in the UK in partnership with the public baths from the middle of the nineteenth century. Many, like the later Scottish ‘steamies,’ were large, often coalpowered, industrial complexes that served whole neighbourhoods, while remaining social gathering points2. However, the decline of the public washhouse was inevitable due to advances in building, sanitary, and washing technology. With water and heating becoming available in the apartments - or at least within proximity - the laundering gradually moved into the domestic sphere. Yet the cleaned, wet clothes inhabited the clothing lines
2 ‘Washing Pens’, The Glasgow Story <http:// www.theglasgowstory. com> [accessed 6 October 2015]; ‘Remembering Tradition at Wash-Houses’, Evening Chronicle Your Stories and Pictures, 2013 <http://www. chroniclelive.co.uk/ lifestyle/nostalgia/ rememberingtradition-at-washhouses-1450146> [accessed 6 October 2015].
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