An article exploring the disappearance of the Swedish ‘tvättstuga’ (communal laundry). It’s historically common in Swedish apartment blocks to have a shared laundry, usually in the basement. Recently however more and more househoulds have their own washing machine, a bad sign for the sharing economy.
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Hi, Mrs. Jack,
read your article in “The Conversation” and looked up your web-site and now your blog. Do you know the Viennese kind of municipal housing? The historical flagship of this being the socalled Karl-Marx-Hof. It has an entry in wikipedia https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Marx-Hof
Once I visited a large exhibition about this kind of municipal housing. Which was a great and big concept in Vienna after WWI. And there I saw laundry machines, photos and one or two real old machines of the then famous Wasch-Salons. You might want to look it up https://dasrotewien-waschsalon.at/karl-marx-hof/ For the foto of the washing place you need to scroll through the fotos.
As far as I remember the idea it difered a bit from what you describe. Working class people had not much garments to change. But they should wear clean stuff for health reasons and therefore wash and dry and use ironing machines as often as necessary.
There is more to it, but I have to leave my desk now, urgently.
Best wishes for your work, sincerely, Gertrud Kamper