Housing for a Lonely Generation

Co-Living Platforms and the Real-Estate-Media Complex

Authors

  • Marija Maric University of Luxembourg

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7480/footprint.17.1.7036

Abstract

Organised around the advertising language for three co-living platforms—WeLive, Quarters (now Habyt), and the Collective—this essay frames the corporate housing model as inseparable from the digital media infrastructures that distribute its contents. Building, on one side, upon the existing research in the domain of housing, real estate, and media, and on the other, on the performative reading of the real estate advertisements of the contemporary co-living projects, it positions this housing typology as a genuine product of the 'real-estate-media complex,' referring to the close entanglements of speculative property markets, media infrastructures, and digital technologies in commodification of housing.

Author Biography

Marija Maric, University of Luxembourg

Marija Marić is an architect, researcher and curator based in Luxembourg. She works as a postdoctoral research associate at the Master in Architecture programme, University of Luxembourg, where she also teaches. Marija has been selected as a co-curator of the Luxembourg Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, with a project that critically unpacks the question of space mining through the perspective of resources. In 2020, she obtained her doctoral degree from the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zurich, with research examining the role of media strategists in the communication, design and globalisation of urban projects. Marija’s work has been presented and published internationally. Her research is organised around the questions of resources, real estate, media, and the production of the built environment and its imaginaries in the context of global capitalism and the global flow of information.

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Published

2023-09-20