Housing as a digitalized service

The purpose of the research proposal is to advance our understanding of how processes of digitalization affect contemporary dwelling practices.

The digitalization of housing refers to a socio-economic shift in housing provision where housing and dwelling becomes increasingly reliant on services enabled by algorithmically steered digital platforms and tools.

These processes take place simultaneously on both the systemic and the lifeworld level, and deeply affect access to housing and the power relations in everyday life in relation to housing and dwelling.

Given the importance of these processes the overall aims of the project are to examine 1) the financial, political and social structures that lead to the production and provision of housing as a digitalized service and 2) the lived experience of dwelling in a digitalized home.

The digitalization of housing is a recent and exponentially growing phenomenon that is fundamentally transforming the housing market, the relation between landlords and tenants, and the experience of ‘home’, but there has thus far been little research on these processes.

Based on a comparative analysis of two historical and four contemporary cases of digitalized residential buildings, the proposal wants to fill the urgent need to understand the social impact of the digitalization of housing because digitalization triggers an increased formalisation and commodification of the social, material and technological orchestration that human dwelling involves.