From Radical to Complicit: A Short History of Home-Sharing

Airbnb’s short history has wrought significant effects at the scale of the room, the house, the neighbourhood and the city, by establishing a framework that enables applicants to lease homes anywhere in the world, in shorter increments of time, and at a premium. In the era of domesticity on-demand, the house and its contents are increasingly publicized, monetized and globalized. While Airbnb is a demonstration par-excellence of the principles of late-stage capitalism, home-sharing has long been a form of resistance against the capitalist imperatives of the nuclear home.

Contextualising the current phenomenon of Airbnb within a broader history of home-sharing, this essay offers a chronology of Modern architectural experiments which reformulated the home as a shared space to challenge prevailing attitudes towards lifestyle and gender. Projects as seemingly remote from one another as Fourier’s Phalanstère in France (1829), Ginzberg and Millinis’ Narkomfin in Moscow (1928-30), Coates’ Isokon in London (1934) and Overend’s Cairo Flats in Melbourne (1936) all recognised that the nuclear home relied on the subjugation of women, and turned to the collective kitchen to restructure the operations of the household. The liberating role of the single-kitchen is further traced through largely neglected historical models like the boarding house, common lodgings and later, the share houses and communes of the 1970s and 80s.

Ultimately, I argue that in spite of these activist underpinnings, home-sharing today has been depoliticised as the house is recast this as value and asset. And yet, many of the contemporary models driven by the Sharing Economy recall the earlier socialist experiments. In reconciling these contradictions, this essay concludes with an analysis of recent domestic propositions by Nishizawa, Dogma and Black Square, Andrés Jaque, and Seneviratna and Idenbayar, to speculate on the future of home-sharing, domestic labour and digital economies.

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