Coliving: the capitalist appropriation of soviet architectural types

Abstract

The house-commune is a residential type that was created after the Revolution of 1917 with the intention of modifying the habits of the population and creating a 'new socialist way of life' based on collectivization. Along with this model, others coexisted ( obschezhitie , transitional housing, supercollectivization ) that shared as a common characteristic the existence of spaces intended for collective use, at the cost of reducing individual private space. Nowadays, terms such as cohousing and coliving have been established, and the number of cooperative homes is growing. The article aims to show that these neologisms correspond to the phagocytation and appropriation by capitalist economies of those centuries-old Soviet types of minimal housing with shared spaces, currently used as a market product aimed at maximizing profits by reducing the surface area of the home.