Rented shared accommodation’s growth in urban settings has been studied through different disciplinary scopes from law and sociology to urban studies and economics. However, the spatial conditions of those who live in such accommodation have lacked rigour. This study applies exploratory mixed-method research, which through a literature review, forms the research question: How does the absence of communal spaces in shared rental homes in London affect our sense of home and our social dynamics?

This project looks at how the social dynamics and sense of home are changing for those who live in rented shared housing in London, focusing on the lack of communal spaces in such properties as a potential direct and indirect source of this problem. This was inspired by my own experiences of living in rented shared accommodation in London for over seven years, as well as the experiences and stories of friends, peers, and my family. Since my experiences didn’t seem to be ‘outliers’, I decided to look further into disciplines like philosophy, law and urban studies to fuel my thinking. This allowed me to see that research in this area is severley lacking. Not only do we lack an accurate record of how many people in London live in shared accommodation, but also, the Rule of Law - the most fundamental principle to the UK’s legislative system is lacking application within this context.

Based upon this, I chose to use Cultural Probes as my main research method to uncover the experiences of the ‘generation share’, alongside thematic analysis to bring objectivity to my analysis, and NLP (Natural Language Processing) as a quantitative method to create a small-scale dataset to consider different linguistical outputs from those who have access to communal spaces compared to those who don’t.