Negroni Talk #47 - So Giving Co-Living: Good Intention Or Bad Invention?

We’re living in housing crisis, and apparently a loneliness epidemic with everyone shut away doing their own thing behind closed doors. Surely the answer to this is for human beings to move away from the isolationism of their personal pursuits in property, and head back to what human civilisation has always been about, namely sharing resources and, most importantly, space. The public realm traditionally offers a natural setting to promote this ‘sharing’, but can the privacy of the domestic domain also do so in practice? Co-living (different to co-housing) is a relatively new foray for the UK residential market and it borrows many of the elements of the co-working model. The visionary rhetoric around it states that it addresses affordability, flexibility and provides an advantageous social way of living. But with private rooms and shared everything else, who is this model of housing aimed at and what is it like to live in? In a post-pandemic world of cost inflation, pressure on budgets and profiteering in equal measure, it’s not hard to see that once the calculators come out, co-living is an attractive proposition for developers to double the number of inhabitants by halving the unit size. This in turn calls into the question the roles of architects, planners and the basic space standards that have been established as a matter of decency over the past few decades. Anyone who has lived in a converted Victorian terraced house share, knows of co-living as a mixed experience. In turn, some of the early co-living developments gave the typology a bad name, however, as with all building types, there will of course be good and bad examples. Co-living projects seem to continue springing up in cities across Europe and other parts of the world, and in some cases these seem like a genuine attempt to reduce the costs of city-centre living. Whilst the scale and number of proposals could be called into question, as can the future flexibility of the new buildings being created, there is may be potential for it to be a model of living that is helpful in the drive toward more adaptive reuse of existing buildings, which is good for the broader environment. So, does co-living represent a new ideal for our urban environment or is it a cynical tactic within the latest ‘gold rush’ to maximise profits from valuable land? Speakers: Rob Fiehn (Chair) Amy Frearson, author and journalist Damien Sharkey, HUB Je Ahn, Studio Weave Gil Eaton, Third Revolution Projects Simon Bayliss, HTA Design