Much is made of the fact that more than half the world’s population now lives in cities. But less frequently discussed is how the way they live is changing – how factors such as the global housing crisis, new advances in digital sharing, the proliferation of slums and the increasingly keen need for social housing are reshaping our very idea of the home.

How We Live Now is a five-part Guardian Cities film series reporting from the frontlines of this urban revolution, by following five pioneers who have found novel ways to live in cities. In conjunction with Shumi Bose, Jack Self and Finn Williams, co-curators of Home Economics, presented by the British Council at the British Pavilion at this year’s architecture biennale in Venice, we went to Tokyo, New York, London, Constitución and Los Angeles to explore how the idea of home is changing.

A home for hours: Tokyo’s internet cafes

Commutes into Tokyo are so long, and apartments so small, that some people sleep in internet cafes.



These manga kissa provide much more than broadband, however. For an hourly fee that can be as low as £1.50, you have access to showers, meals, clothes and everything else you might need for a substitute “home”.



At i Cafe AKIBAPLACE, an internet cafe in Tokyo’s electronics district Akihabara, Guardian Cities’ Yusuke Uchijima found a young man who was perfectly happy to chat about why he often prefers to sleep there.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Communal daybeds and shared household items feature at the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2016

The cafes are cheap and a great option when you’re feeling lazy and don’t want to go home to an empty apartment, he says, adding: “I have a difficult time making friends.” But he was not ashamed of his lifestyle. “When I see my boss at the station, I tell him I slept in a net cafe.”

A Home for Hours, the first room in the Home Economics exhibition at the Venice Biennale, visualises this idea. The exhibition is comprised of five rooms that imagine how our idea of “home” is adapting to different time periods: a home for hours, for days, for weeks, for months and for years.

A Home for Hours sets out a series of multipurpose daybeds in a communal living room, containing the shared items of the house: books, clothes, a vacuum cleaner. Just as apps such as Peerby are encouraging small-town sharing in big-city life, so in Japan the social stigma around living in shared spaces is breaking down. Many Japanese (though mostly single men) have embraced manga kissa because they afford a more luxurious lifestyle – huge comic libraries, top-end gaming, easier dinner options – than living in a tiny flat two hours from the office.



A home for days: New York’s Airbnb nomads

When David Roberts and Elaine Kuok moved to New York City, they packed everything into three suitcases and lived solely on Airbnb. A year and a half later, they’re still doing it. The couple spend a set number of days in each apartment. For that time, it’s their home.

So could digital sharing make owning your own house obsolete, or at least unnecessary for long periods of time? Home Economics conceives of this concept as “Home is where the Wi-Fi is”, with a visualisation of the idea by art collective åyr in the form of an inflatable zorb emblazoned with housing slogans.

But while David and Elaine are taking this idea fairly literally, they point out that it’s only possible in a handful of the biggest, most technologically connected cities. And as the couple set their rent at the average income for New York City – which is currently above $3,000 a month – it is clear that this is not an option available to all.

A home for months: London rediscovers ‘co-housing’

In north-west London, the old idea of the boarding house has become newly fashionable again, as we discovered when we visited the Collective – a slick, modern-day dormitory that is responding more or less directly to the issue of spiralling rents.

A new block of more than 500 apartments, the Collective acts like a giant shared house: small private bedrooms with communal laundry, kitchens, spa, cinema and workspaces … and some covert matchmaking by the managers. Indeed, while the boarding house was outlawed in Britain for encouraging sexual licentiousness, the Collective hopes that networking (of the business and romantic kinds) will be a key reason people sign up to in 12 sq m rooms for more than £1,000 a month.

The architectural practices Dogma and Black Square used their opportunity in the British Pavilion to point out another function of these communal spaces: paying directly for domestic labour, which in the past might have been rewarded disproportionately poorly – if at all. “All in one” units like the ones offered by the Collective explicitly pay for employees to perform “housework” that might otherwise be undertaken for free.

A home for years: Constitución’s ‘half-houses’

In Constitución, a city in southern Chile, the architect Alejandro Aravena – who is also the creative director of the Venice Biennale this year – has been reshaping the idea of social housing. Aravena’s “half-houses” are exactly that – houses that leave one side for residents to complete themselves.

They have several advantages, he argues. They are cheaper to build, and easier to construct, than traditional social housing. But crucially, they also allow the homeowners themselves to invest in the property to bring it up to a middle-class standard: the exact same process that happens without guidance (and indeed often against the law) in informal settlements around the world.



In the context of Chile, Aravena’s ideas empowered a group of people whose lives were devastated by a natural disaster – the 2010 tsunami. In the British context, of course, Jack Self points out that handing ownership of social housing to the people who live there was the reasoning behind the right-to-buy policy – which has been an unmitigated disaster for anyone who needs social housing but wasn’t lucky enough to ride the first wave of selloffs.

A home for decades: ‘multigenerational’ living in Los Angeles

Inland Empire is a sprawling suburban residential area outside Los Angeles, home to upwards of 5 million people, and one of the areas hit hardest by the US financial crash.



“It has become really difficult for younger people to afford a home on their own,” says Matthew Sauls of Pardee Homes. “And an ageing population on the other end made us think that there was a marriage here. So we wanted to design a house that allows families to group together, but also have the dignity of their own space.”

Pardee adapted its existing house models to incorporate two units, essentially creating two houses under one roof. One of the new homeowners in Woodmont, California, is Marie Clausman. She lives in one wing of their grand house, with her sister in the second wing and her daughter’s family upstairs. The arrangement gives this big California family companionship and a nicer house – and gives both Marie and her sister the dignity of their own front door.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hesselbrand’s ‘long term occupancy’ flat at the British pavilion in Venice: light and dark, private and public, wet and dry, open and closed

So as Americans live longer and the kids struggle to move out, could multigenerational living be a new model for the suburban dream home? Certainly it’s common in many communities around the world for several generations to live together in a large family. Sauls also points out that, as Americans are living longer, rooms often change their purpose over time – so Pardee built the rooms to accommodate more than one particular activity, allowing families to “age in place”.

Indeed, if you think about a house not over a year or two but 50, who knows who will be occupying it, and how? At the British pavilion, the architectural practice Hesselbrand responded to this idea with a kind of “very-long-term” occupancy unit, in which there are no predetermined activities denoted by domestic fittings. Rather than a living room or a bedroom or a kitchen, the house is organised around more abstract functions: a dark room and a light room, a wet room and a dry room, or a soft room and a hard room. The space can then be adapted over time, no matter who lives in it.

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