Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the home sharing abroad students’ experience, in result of the students exchange programs, especially in what concerns new ways of living, from lifestyle to house rules.

Paper long abstract:

During the 20th century, European urban lifestyle was rooted on the home sharing tradition of family-based pre-industrial living rules (Löfgren, 2003; Cieraad, 1999; 2002). Nevertheless, these patterns definitely changed, in multiple ways, and are expressed in various phenomena, one of which is home sharing abroad for students exchange programs (Ramalhete, 2014).

Since when young people shared their family homes and lifestyles from birth until marriage - and often after it - until the present, where millions of youngsters (man and women), often from different origins, rent and share a house or an apartment in a foreign country for a limited period of time, times definitely changed, as did the cultural values regarding domestic roles, their virtues and vices. We are now in presence of new mobility patterns but also of new lifestyles and house rules.

The homesharing experience comprises aspects such as the quest for a suitable place to rent, the establishment of house rules, encountering cultural differences, dealing with conflict management on living areas, one's property or on dividing the shelf space in the refrigerator, finding levels of understanding and compromise (often in more than one language), and, of course, usually implies also a lot of fun, as partying plays an important role on the whole studying abroad experience. More or less conscientiously, domesticity is under discussion and new territories of the public and private realms are explored. The presentation will reveal some results from a research based on Portuguese architecture exchange students regarding the domestic use of home sharing.