Dust and Domesticity: Maintenance and Toronto’s Reform Movements (1900-1930s)

Abstract

Maintenance practices remain an understudied area within architectural discourse. Dusting, sweeping, and mopping—in both the domestic and public spheres—have often been deemed inconsequential to our experience of the built environment. The absence of maintenance within architectural discourse seeks to preserve a facile and autonomous image of capital A architecture. By examining maintenance—specifically what is being maintained—we challenge this idealized version of architecture and instead expose its deeply interconnected social relations and systems of care. This thesis uses dust as a lens to evaluate maintenance practices within Toronto’s 19th-century reform movement. Centered on Toronto’s first immigrant neighborhood, the Ward, this thesis traces the discourse on housework in relation to concerns over nation-building within Toronto’s larger settler-colonial landscape. It contrasts two approaches to housework practices within the Ward, highlighting the tension between the institutional presence of public health and that of grassroots organizations. As dust frames the gendered, social, and material dimensions of this investigation, this thesis finds that domestic maintenance practices became deeply intertwined with questions of citizenship, belonging, and agency. Specifically, this thesis analyzes the use of sanitary inspectors, municipal housekeepers, and publications such as The Little Blue Book Series by public health to enforce a standardized ideal of housework on Toronto’s growing immigrant working class. In contrast, grassroots organizations such as Visiting Housekeepers and Settlement Houses, which operated intimately within the Ward, recognized situated domestic conditions and cultural differences and sought to use housework as a tool of empowerment. In its transgression and destabilization of spatial borders, dust defies conventions of architectural order. By examining the overlooked narratives of dust, this paper highlights the resistance of immigrant communities and challenges dominant narratives of urban reform.