Co-living housing: thinking infrastructurally about urban housing for millennial professionals

Abstract

Co-living first emerged as a niche shared housing trend in the mid-2010s, involving millennial start-up entrepreneurs sharing a home with like-minded roommates. Early iterations of this housing type in New York City and San Francisco were driven by millennial entrepreneurs' aspirations for improving productivity, generating tacit knowledge transfer opportunities, and reducing living costs. In the past 10 years, the sector has transformed into a verifiable housing asset class, with multiple start-ups valued in the billions. Despite the unprecedented rise to prominence as a recognisable new form of housing, there remains a critical gap in research that examines exactly what co-living housing is, and how it articulates with broader social, political, and economic processes. This thesis responds to this gap, identifying co-living housing as an infrastructure that supports the precarious attachment that many young professionals have with both work and housing. The thesis investigates how co-living housing involves reshaping: legal relationships between people and housing, household materialities, meanings and cultures of home, residential mobility, and household practices supporting productive work and domestic sociality. This thesis also researches how these co-living housing practices simultaneously intersect with and enable the assetization of housing, insecure labour relations in knowledge economy industries, new discourses around the ideal home, and institutionally precarious housing policy and governance. This thesis generates informed insight into co-living housing. Specifically, this thesis answers what co-living is, how it articulates alongside wider social and political-economic processes, what meanings and cultures of home it supports, its relationship with housing markets and capital, and how it connects with housing policy and governance. As a body of work, the thesis highlights the infrastructural work of co-living housing and how it organises and supports particular social practices and actions, including ordering and organising meanings and cultures of home, processes of assetization and housing policy and governance. The thesis also establishes the broader value of thinking infrastructurally about housing. Housing matters, and is much more than a passive stage for social life to unfurl. Co-living housing does things to the social world: it supports or resists certain processes. This thesis uses these findings to argue that housing as infrastructure must be at the forefront of urban governance. Housing is a central infrastructure for life and labour. Yet, in the absence of clear and appropriate housing policy and governance, the infrastructural work of housing is left to the agenda of institutional investors and real estate developers.

Date of Thesis submission	2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Western Sydney University
Supervisor	Emma Power (Supervisor) & Andrew Gorman-Murray (Supervisor)