ABSTRACT
The infrastructures that form an intimate and co-constitutive part of the subject are fragile: they can recede, fall apart, or become emphatically unsupportive. Against the backdrop of what Isabelle Stengers has called ‘the coming barbarism’, the environment (both constructed and ‘natural’) must be viewed less as a resource to be used than as a facilitative milieu that supports and shapes us. What, we ask, might this mean for progressive models of housing, and attempts to live together?
This chapter sets out a feminist critique of the emerging “co-living” model as it has been recently advanced by well-meaning architects in collaboration with disruptive propertydevelopers across the globe. Continuing our ongoing project of formulating a critical feminist real estate theory for architecture, we here offer a critical reading of three recent experiments in rental housing in the global city contexts of London and Stockholm. In each case, we argue, whilst a rhetorics of the assumed good of collective living is extended to occupants, what is in fact achieved is an architecture of captivation, captivity, compulsory conviviality, a pervasive Fear of Missing Out, precarity, control and what Lieven De Cauter has warned is the “capsularisation” of contemporary life. Co-ownership and co-governance remain, in all three cases, notably absent.
As human bodies, not just as women, children and the wretched of the earth, we are all vulnerable, and rely on our facilitative environments for support. Architects and theorists should, we argue, be wary of too quickly romanticising the neatness of the bare cell and the hush of adolescent sex it requires, let alone the celebration of transience and creative labour 24/7 or the permanent exceptions of dispossession and being ready to leave at less than a moment’s notice. We all have a fundamental right to shelter, to an ‘inhabitable ground’, whoever we are.
