Home in Common: Collective Platforms Towards A Convivial City

As the age-old notion of ‘sharing’ passes into contemporary capitalism to become the basis of ‘the sharing economy,’ its character changes fundamentally—taking on deeply aporetic implications. On one hand, the networks of this ‘platform capitalism’ allow a distributed, fluidly-liberated mode of exchange, fostering forms of flux and openness that exceed the comparatively-static models that preceded it. On the other hand, this fluidity is too often accompanied by a dissolution of stability and mutual obligation, leading to precarious forms of life. The sharing economy is always in motion, for better or for worse.

Of course, this aporia speaks not only to the sharing economy, but also to similar tensions within both neoliberal capitalism and architecture itself, which—over the past two-plus decades of theoretical preoccupation with systems, fields, flows, and infrastructures—has, as Douglas Spencer notes, come to embrace an ordering logic uncannily similar to that of neoliberalism. Recently termed managerialism or, following late Deleuze, modulation, this tendency sees designers working infra- to the everyday. Seeking to define networks that not only foster but reshape and actively harness an entrepreneurial self-organization and emergence, these projects operate in a way perversely similar to the platform-capitalists of Uber or Valve.

In any case, the distributed, immanent forms of power that underlie both models raise a host of questions—not least around issues of agency, ethics, and collective action. How might sharing be reclaimed from the sharing economy, recapturing its heritage in communality, solidarity, and collective action? Could counter-platforms form the basis for a re-emergence of a truly urban condition—at least, in the sense in which ‘the urban’ is fundamentally an agonistic sharing of not only space but also agency? In turn, what are the architectures—the collective forms—of such a model of communal self-organization, and how might they point toward new modes of living together in the city? These tendencies begin to suggest ways to collectively construct a truly con-vivial city—excavating from the etymological root of the word a generous, ebullient sense of living-with.

Begun as a speculative research project, Home in Common uses the pretext of a fully-distributed collective-housing system as a cipher with which to decode the internal contradictions of distributed-agency models in both architecture and sharing platforms. Building from precedents in architecture (Hannes Meyer’s Co-op Zimmer; micro-units, Baugruppen), the article develops a notion of home in common: networked models of domesticity in which home’s constituent components are unbundled within the city, allowing them to be held collectively. This concept is then traced through four anecdotes that embody tendencies latent in such models: ‘I Take a Bath, You Take a Bath, We Take a Bath’ (convivial domesticities); ‘Cross-Dressing on the Block’ (mutualistic exchange); ‘Brains and Gains’ (fortuitous recombinations); and ‘Bloc/Party’ (emergent forms of collectivity).

Taken together, these concepts point toward a future in which fluidity and impermanence foster not precarity but rather new forms of sociality—lubricating a process of collective becoming. Urban space is claimed as an act of mutualism, sharing, and exchange: the city becomes a platform for a convivial, collective individuation.