Paper short abstract:

The talk focuses on Japan's recent "share house" trend and discusses it as a new format of urban collective housing informed by Japan's changing socio-economic agenda. I explore the physical space of the "share house" and its social function of generating alternative modes of intimacy and belonging.

Paper long abstract:

In the last decades Japan has been undergoing an extensive societal change centered mainly on family, employment, and patterns of social organization. Later and fewer marriages lead to a growing amount of singles; new patterns of employment produce new groups with diversified income and living conditions; the virtualization of communication generates new spaces of social interaction.

As traditional networks of intimacy and belonging are replaced by more atomized modes of living, new institutions emerge that enable alternative forms of social bonding. This paper focuses on one such institution - a new type of housing referred to as the "share house". "Share house" is a format of collective residence, whereby large living spaces are divided into separate units, furnished, and rented out to individual tenants. Often they are organized by a certain principle, such as same-gender houses, houses for single mothers, multicultural houses etc. The popularity of the "share house" is in sharp contrast with the conventional style of Japanese housing, where "home" is defined by middle-class ideals of privacy and nuclear family.

This talk presents the "share house" phenomenon as a new spatial format addressing Japan's changing socio-economic agenda. I discuss the space of the share house as a physical manifestation of contemporary urban living; I then explore the notion of a place as defined by the process in which a sense of intimacy and belonging is generated - in other words, in which a "house" becomes a "home". I further link the notion of a home to the changing realities of Japanese family, and suggest that in contemporary urban Japan, the "share house" addresses the need in alternative modes of familial intimacy and social bonding.

Is "share house" a passing trend or a lasting development capable of redefining the notions of "public" and "private", of a family and a community? Does this new format of co-residence represent an attempt to revitalize (or perhaps reinvent) Japan's long-cherished communality, or a largely economic solution triggered by Japan's continuous recession? The talk will address these questions and place them in a wider global context.