new subjectivities.5 However, this intention cannot be fully achieved in the present social and political context, as long as it remains detached from wider political efforts for radical social transformations. Therefore, collective living emerges as a target and as the projection of a social imaginary. As such, it does reveal a paradox. Collective living is not the end of a social procedure but it is the procedure itself, and the collective space is a symbolic place. This place denotes what it is meant to be in the future and therefore what it cannot be in the present context.Therefore, the collective space is not only an opposition to its present but a projection of what it is meant to be; what it symbolises and represents. The collective space cannot be thus the product of a designer’s imagination, and if it is, this cannot be anything more than speculation. If collective space is truly collective, it is unpredictable. It is a product of “what people do, feel, sense, and come to articulate as they seek meaning in their daily lives.”6 To paraphrase Harvey, its conception delineates a liminal social space, a space of possibilities, where something socially different and antagonistic is not only possible but also crucial for radical trajectories.7 Domestic life no longer belongs strictly in the private domain but gradually becomes exposed into different levels of publicness. The way personal life appears in domestic space is not anymore a private but a social and political matter. Conserving, therefore, collective living in political terms, domestic collective space can be perceived of as a liminal political space; an incubator of the main social and political space, the public. The collective space is thus a space where social experimentation can acquire the absolute degree of radicality. In this sense, collective space is a heterotopic space, a space of possibility for collective action in order to create something radically different and antagonistic to its social and political context. The research does not imply that collective living can address the social, political and economic reasons causing housesharing and the housing crisis in London. This is not only unrealistic but moreover exceeds the limits of what architecture can achieve. However, the aim of the research was not to bypass the dominant role of the economic interests in the metropolis and the way speculation defines the city and the forms of living. On the contrary, it revealed the irrational logic which defines the way people have to live, and to targeted to think beyond and against the economic realism of the current metropolitan condition; not by ignoring it, but dealing with it in social and political terms. It did not claim that can resolve the origins of social problems,
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Domestic conflicts and the conflict for the domestic
5. This is based on the hypothesis that architecture has the ability to influence social behaviour. This premise is not different from the perception of the built environment of the house as a “social condenser”, through which the Soviet architects defined their architectural efforts to transform the way people live by transforming how housing operates in a communal way. Kopp, Anatole, Ibid, pp. 96, 98, 101-2, 109-16
6. Harvey, David, Ibid, p. 18
7. Ibid See also, Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, Translated by Nicholson - Smith, Donald, [Oxford: Blackwell, 1991], p. 366 See also, Lefebvre, Henri. The Right To The City. In: Kofman, E., Lebas, E. (Ed.) Writings on Cities, [London: Blackwell, 1967], pp. 63 - 184