Shared Housing, Shared Lives Everyday Experiences Across the Lifecourse

Shared Housing, Shared Lives provides important theoretical and ethnographic accounts of shared living arrangements, ranging from the familiar spare-room lodger, and multi-person house-share, to strong ideological commitment to values of collective living. In a climate of austerity, many more people in the UK find themselves sharing their homes and habits with housemates, and the authors of this book invite you to step inside the material spaces and social, sensory proximities of day-to-day sharing. At last, an incisive and nuanced analysis of shared housing.

Dr Helen Jarvis, Reader in Social Geography, Newcastle University, UK

While standard nuclear family households loom large in imaginings of contemporary domestic relations, not least among planners and policy makers, in recent years, sharing a home with strangers has become a more common experience. Across developed societies, supportive links between life-course transitions and ascent up a housing ladder have become increasingly fragile and movement, markedly non-linear, with this pattern exacerbated by recent economic crises. This book represents the most advanced and thorough analysis of the current conditions of sharing households. It builds on a deep contextual knowledge of the rise and conditions of contemporary sharers as well as important empirical insights from English cases.

Professor Richard Ronald, Professor of Housing, Society and Space, Centre for Urban Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands