Ethnographic Perspectives on the Evolution of Shared Housing Models and Practices : From Squat to Coliving.

Born from the emergence of plural needs and housing scarcity, squat movements advocated in the 1980s in large European cities for the right to a home as superior to the protection of private property (Ferreri 2023; Pattaroni 2015, 2021). Agendas of solidarity, creation and maintenance of commons manifested in shared housing arrangements (Breviglieri et Pattaroni 2005; Vasudevan 2023). Decades later, the rapidly growing industry of privately managed coliving operations mobilises shared housing models as profit-driven developers’ tools and epitomizes the process of financialization in its housing form (Casier 2023). Through mutualisation of domestic space, private coliving operators reinvent elements of radical and alternative housing models in commodified and financialized forms (Marcuse et Madden 2016). Still, both squats and colivings account for domestic settings and experiences in which to negotiate, preserve and ground one’s autonomy as an individual dwelling among strangers. Have any features of non-kin domesticities introduced by militant-driven radical housing experiments persisted in financialised contemporary shared housing models? How does this evolution translate in collective and individual home-making practices, and ultimately, on the constitution and perception of shared housing as a home? The present work relies on two ethnographies, conducted 20 years apart, based respectively in Geneva squats and in a London coliving. The ethnographic framework provides insight on the everyday and mundane tensions raised by living with strangers embedded within the dwelling space and its materiality. Analysed through a comparative approach, the studied examples are relevant to understand an evolution of shared housing towards increasingly institutionalised, formalised and profit-driven models in urban and tense housing markets, and the factors determining whether dwelling among strangers can provide grounds for communality and agency over one’s living arrangement and space, or translate in strategies purely intended to distance oneself from collective domesticity and foster a perceived residential precarity.