Coliving housing : home cultures of precarity for the new creative class

The economy is entrenched in the domestic and the domestic enables the economy. We consider this dialectical relationship between the economy and ‘home’ through a case study of coliving, a new type of privately delivered shared housing emerging in response to increasingly precarious economic conditions. We examine how the proliferation of coliving signifies shifting meanings and cultures of home for digital nomads, the latest iteration of the creative class. We draw upon a content analysis of twenty websites of coliving organisations located in New York and San Francisco, United States of America. Our analysis uncovers emergent meanings and cultures of home that are strongly associated with economic conditions. We consider how the spatial manifestations of a precarious economy are supported by new homemaking practices and imaginaries of home – what may be termed home cultures of precarity. Coliving challenges conventional meanings of home: a reprieve from work, private, secure and inhabited long term. Instead, home is a capital accumulation technology for this cohort – a site for the active production of capital. The ideal home for the new creative class is a place of work that is mobile and social. The economy, meanings of home and homemaking practices are coproductive and co-emergent