THE DE-INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF HOUSING

Golden Lane (Alison & Peter Smithsons)

Leisure and work are inseparable terms: one stands in for the absence of the other. As part of the well-greased capitalist machinery, leisure time is the only alternative to working time. Capitalist nations have not only invested in improving the productivity of society’s working hours but have also designed with great emphasis the leisure time of the working masses. In this sense, leisure should be understood as the “non-work” period of time carefully calculated to make the working masses the most productive. Leisure is needed to survive work.

The architectural exploration towards a large-scale social recreation is part of the state’s will to regulate leisure. Capitalist nations have invested heavily in holiday resorts and infrastructures with the aim to channelize the surfeit of non-working time of the masses. Tourism then has to be seen as the consequence of an economical system that simultaneously implied the standardization of a way of life.  From Thomas Cook to Club Med, tourism has been instrumentalized to offer a fictitious temporary space of alternative. Spaces that seem aside from the socio-political authority but which are in fact at the core of a system based on the inequalities between developed and developing worlds

If we look to the global phenomenon of tourism through these lenses, it might be easier to understand why the emergence of AirBNB is so disturbing. It is not that AirBnB provides a more distributed geolocation of tourism with 70% of the rooms offered outside the over-crowded Tourist Districts; it is not that guests usually stay an average of almost +3 nights in compared to traditional modes of tourism accommodation; it is not that guests and hosts enjoy or suffer from a new kind of interaction - all the points just mentioned are in fact advantages that City Councils would like to embrace.  If AirBnB is so disturbing, it is simply because it evidences the failure of one of the main pillars of capitalism: the housing policy.

As a principle, capitalism required a standardized working force with uniform character to assure high productivity. Housing was the device to assure such uniformity, that is, in words of Riken Yamamoto, it was hoped that standardized housing would create standardized families and continue to re-produce a standardized working force. With such an intention, housing was converted into a facility; it became institutionalized. With the premise of “one house = one family”, housing was packaged into independent units around the structure of a family. The social contradictions of society (elder, handicapped or any other “unproductive” mode of living) were treated as problems inside “one house = one family”, a system that lessened the burden of the state considerably. This is the main reason why this model of collective housing, the CIAM model, became widespread throughout the world.

AirBnB can’t be designed. It is just a mediator: its success lays on the flagrant vacancies that an expired housing model is continuously creating. Almost 80% of AirBnB hosts offer rooms in the apartment they are living in.  AirBnB only retains 7% of each transaction that goes directly to the pockets of the local citizens. For the first time, tourism has been democratized. AirBnB has signaled the end of a status quo, the failure of standardization. At the very end, societies consist of single mothers, temporary migrants, international students, travelling workers, lonely elders, refugees, divorced, …Rooms in apartments remain as empty as the back seats of a car. However, is there today a spatial model able to replace the “one house-one family” system? The necessity of a new typology of housing is more urgent than ever.