Shared Housing, Shared Lives

Sue Heath is Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives, University of Manchester, UKKatherine Davies is Lecturer in Sociology at The University of Sheffield, UKGemma Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester, UKRachael M Scicluna is a Lecturer in the School of Anthropology and Conservation at the University of Kent, UK

• 1. Introduction: Shared housing in context2. The challenges of shared living3. Motivations for shared living4. The economic and material organisation of shared housing5. The spatial organisation of shared living6. Time matters in shared living7. ConclusionAppendix 1: Pen portraits of research participantsBibliographyIndex

Shared Housing, Shared Lives provides important theoretical and ethnographic accounts of shared living arrangements, ranging from the familiar spare-room lodger, and multi-person house-share, to strong ideological commitment to values of collective living. In a climate of austerity, many more people in the UK find themselves sharing their homes and habits with housemates, and the authors of this book invite you to step inside the material spaces and social, sensory proximities of day-to-day sharing. At last, an incisive and nuanced analysis of shared housing. Dr Helen Jarvis, Reader in Social Geography, Newcastle University, UKWhile standard nuclear family households loom large in imaginings of contemporary domestic relations, not least among planners and policy makers, in recent years, sharing a home with strangers has become a more common experience. Across developed societies, supportive links between life-course transitions and ascent up a housing ladder have become increasingly fragile and movement, markedly non-linear, with this pattern exacerbated by recent economic crises. This book represents the most advanced and thorough analysis of the current conditions of sharing households. It builds on a deep contextual knowledge of the rise and conditions of contemporary sharers as well as important empirical insights from English cases.Professor Richard Ronald, Professor of Housing, Society and Space, Centre for Urban Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands