Vol. 41 No. 3 (2026) Articles
By Nicholas Smith
In Athens, Greece, real estate developers have entered the market for co-living establishments catered to remote workers and digital nomads. At the same time, a cost-of-living crisis has made co-living appealing to Athenians themselves as a means of negotiating rising rental prices caused by the commoditization of housing. This article attends to the form of collective domesticity that has taken shape in this context. While co-living developers seek to interpellate tenants through notions of “dreaming” and “community,” it is an ethic detached from these conceptualizations of shared values that emerges as the affective affordance of domestic life in co-living spaces. Joining attention to domesticity with a discussion of financialization, I argue that co-living establishments leverage the perceived benefits of an “impersonal intimacy” among their tenants and, in so doing, fuse conditions of precarity to the structural circumstances that have sustained the commodification of housing in the city.
precarity; co-living; real estate speculation; mobility; domesticity; affect
Copyright (c) 2026 Nicholas Smith
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
