Strangers’ co-habitation - An atlas of collaborative housing typologies at the rise of sharing economy

Strangers’ co-habitation: An atlas of collaborative housing typologies at the rise of sharing economy – 陌生人的共居之地：共享经济: 崛起的合作住房类型图集

Jiong Abingo Wu 吴炅 , Runze Zhang 张润泽, Ching Huen (Brittany) Leung

Airbnb, HomeAway, Flippedkey, Couchsurfing, the list continues. The rise of peer-to-peer collaborative housing consumption has reshaped contemporary living landscape. In unraveling this rising housing practice, the current literature mainly focuses on its impingements on tourist industry, rental housing market, and public revenue. Its housing design potentials are largely understudied, especially the design innovations that unleash the surplus residential resources and punctuate the single-family dominant habitation norms. To fill the gap, this research documents and analyzes creative housing typologies formulated by the home sharing hosts and their guests across the world.

Combing online architectural typology case studies and onsite ethnographic investigations, this research examines why and how people appropriate sharing platforms to transform their living spaces and accommodate the “strangers”. The investigation consists two components. The first component is an extensive online documentation, which offers diverse and creative collaborative housing cases across the world. The primary sources are collected from various sharing housing platforms, including Airbnb, HomeAway, Flippedkey, Couchsurfing, etc. The second component is an in-depth onsite ethnographic investigation on several selected cases, which offers “thick description”. The cases are analyzed under five themes, which speak to five major contemporary housing issues: housing unaffordability, residential segregation, housing surplus, rural settlement decline, and neighborhood gentrification. Complying with these themes, we discuss the implications for new housing typologies, housing policies, and living experiences.

The goal of this research is to reveal both the limits and the potentials of the rising sharing economy brought to the contemporary housing practices. Ultimately, it aims to probe a new housing paradigm – the “peer-to-peer collabrative housing”, which potentially goes beyond the existing “public”, “collective”, and “cooperative” housing models.

Airbnb、HomeAway、Flippedkey、Couchsurfing，名单还不止这些。对等合作住房消费的兴起重塑了当代生活景观。在对这一不断增长的住房行为的揭示中，目前的文献主要关注其对旅游业、住房租赁市场和公共收入的影响。其住房设计潜力大多未得到充分考虑，尤其是那些释放剩余住宅资源，并打破单户家庭住宅范式的创新设计。为填补这一空白，本研究记录并分析了共享住房的主人及其全球客人制定的创意住房类型。

通过在线建筑类型学案例研究和现场人种学调查，本研究探讨了人们为什么以及如何利用共享平台来改变他们的生活空间并容纳“陌生人”。调查包括两个部分。第一部分是一个广泛的在线文档，记录了世界各地创意性住房共享案例。案例主要是从各种共享平台收集而来，包括Airbnb、HomeAway、Flippedkey、Couchsurfing等。第二部分是对几个选定案例所做的的深入的人种学调查，“内容详实”。案例分析从五个方面展开，涉及五个主要的当代住房问题：住房负担能力低下、住宅隔离、住房过剩、农村住房减少和邻近地区士绅化。通过这些问题，我们将讨论它们给新的住房类型、住房政策和生活经验所带来的影响。

这项研究旨在揭示不断增长的共享经济对当代住房行为带来的局限和潜力，最终目的是探索一种新的住房模式——“对等合作住房”，它极有可能超越现有的“公共”、“集体”和“合作”式住房模式。

Credits:

Jiong Abingo Wu 吴炅, Runze Zhang 张润泽, Ching Huen (Brittany) Leung. Students: David Zhi Chen, Andrew D’Angelo, Joao Ellery Lustosa Furtado de Oliv, Andrew Turner Harper, Emily R Hu, Liu Wentao, Rachel Ly, Alaina Ann Marra, Xinran Min, Alba Ivania, Rivera, Roxanne Sarrafzadeh, Jalal Khalidy Samarali, Ashley Woo, Xiang Xi.