The Co-’s of Co-Living: How the Advertisement of Living Is Taking Over Housing Realities

Federico Coricelli
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Federico Coricelli: Future Urban Legacy Lab, Politecnico di Torino, Italy

Urban Planning, 2022, vol. 7, issue 1, 296-304

Abstract: Co-living penetrated the urban realm both as a housing format and a neologism with fluid meaning. The co-living concept was developed by various companies in the early 2010s claiming to provide a valuable alternative to flat living in highly competitive rental markets. As a real estate product, co-living consists of all-inclusive rental plans of furnished rooms connected to fully equipped communal areas, conceived both for short-term and long-term stays. The few realized buildings combine collective spaces as laundries and co-working spaces with rooms as small as nine square meters. This kind of layout explicitly targets the urban middle-classer willing to live simultaneously together and apart . Differently from other housing formats, co-living is promoted through the jargon of sharing economy more than one of real-estate agencies. The co- root is commonly explained in companies’ recurring website section “What’s co-living?” as collective- living, convenient -living, and community -living. The emphasis on communitarian living echoes the semantics of co-housing. However, co-living communities differ radically from co-housing ones, based on a bottom-up initiative of inhabitants subscribing to a contract of cohabitation. In contrast, a co-living community is generated exclusively through economic accessibility. This article gives a critical insight into the mutated meanings of housing in the digital era by analysing co-living companies’ narratives and their spatial counterpart in realized buildings. The evidence collected by co-living promotion contributes to addressing a broader shift in real estate towards emphasizing the experiential dimension of lifestyle over space and shelter as primary housing features.

Keywords: co-living; housing; living; real estate (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:urbpla:v7:y:2022:i:1:p:296-304

DOI: 10.17645/up.v7i1.4805

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