NEOLIBERAL DOMESTICITY
On domesticity, patterns and co-living
According to this year’s Life at Home Report by IKEA, “when we think of the space at home, most of us think about a physical area where we keep our things and go about our daily activities. In other words: four walls and a roof”. Also, “almost half of the people in the same study (48%) say that they think of a home as a place where they have their most important relationships”. The basic meaning of the term has not changed, “home” still means “the place in which one’s domestic affections are centered”. Still, a very big change can be perceived in our way of experiencing the household and the domestic affection. The archetypal home space, based on a tradition which belongs to a faraway past, is still the protagonist of the contemporary society, where every single aspect of privacy/interacting/dwelling has been re-shaped according to new standards. Increasing population, housing crisis and youth unemployment appear to be the most obvious causes for which the spaces designed to host mother, father and children are now re-used from a much broader, ambiguous, multifaceted and uncategorizable class of tenants. Fast urbanisation and increasing loneliness leave no doubt about the fact that co-living is the future of residing. The cohabitation mechanism has overcome the marriage nest concept and has displaced new forms of household inside old shells. What follows is a focus on how a given space, structured according to the last century model of traditional family, has adjusted in order to host a new social arrangement, a host–parasite co-evolution, where the spontaneity of the process is directly proportional to the quality of the social mechanisms contained . Glimpses of views in specific moments constantly reveal that not only the domestic realm is spontaneously influenced by the relationships happening in its core, but also that patterns, gestures and objects constantly redress with new layers whatever may be found in-between every “four walls and a roof”. The oikonomia of a shared space, the communal activities, the production, hence the “relationships” , sometimes settle in an ephemeral balance which is the shaping force of the surrounding environment, a form follows function process applied to the domestic scale. Establishing a connection with each others’ way of living, challenging the household status quo, co-habiting with others as a small community in a shared domestic environment can become a realizable utopia.