Facts

Contact person:
Guy Baeten
Financer:
  • Swedish Research Council
Responsible at MaU:
Guy Baeten
Project members at MaU:
External project members:
  • Maja de Neergaard – Roskilde University
  • Fredrik Torisson – LTH Lund University
  • Pablo Miranda – LTH Lund University
  • Maria Kaika – University of Amsterdam
Affiliated:
  • Inge Goudsmit – Chinese University of Hong Kong
Time frame:
01 January 2024 - 31 December 2029
Faculty/department:
Research environment :
Research subject:

About the project

The purpose of the research proposal is to advance our understanding of how processes of digitalisation affect contemporary dwelling practices. The digitalisation of housing refers to a socio-economic shift in housing provision where housing and dwellings become increasingly reliant on services enabled by algorithmically steered digital platforms and tools. These processes take place simultaneously on both the systemic and the lifeworld levels 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 digitalised service and
  2. the lived experience of dwelling in a digitalised home.

The digitalisation of housing is a recent and exponentially growing phenomenon that fundamentally transforms 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 digitalised residential buildings, the proposal wants to fill the urgent need to understand the social impact of the digitalisation of housing because digitalisation triggers an increased formalisation and commodification of the social, material and technological orchestration that human dwelling involves.