Living rooms for rent by the minute outsource the whole idea of home
The Conversation
November 13, 2017
A living room rented by the minute and another room shared for sleeping – the age of the ‘distributed’ home is upon us.
—Ziferblat
Zifferblatt with double f and double t is a German and Russian word for
a watch face. Ziferblat with only one f and one t is a home you can
rent by the minute. The missing letters are a clue to what you get –
not the whole deal.
In a time when rents and rental insecurity are high and people are
sharing rooms with strangers just to have a bed for the night, it is
worth looking at this new “home as a service” enterprise.
Ziferblat
originated in Moscow and spread from there to St Petersburg and other
Russian and Eastern locations via Ljubljana to Manchester, Liverpool
and London. Around the world, there are currently 14 Ziferblat venues,
described as places for cultural and social engagement.
Russia has had a cultural precedent for communal living. After the 1917
revolution, komunalkas emerged to provide collective living
arrangements in response to an acute urban housing crisis.
don’t have a place to call home during the day
The Ziferblat concept seems a perfect fit for those who share a room at
night but don’t have a place to call home during the day. Each venue is
open from 10am to midnight and offers a place to relax, read, cook or
work – you can even have a nap. It is fully furnished and the website
shows your companions performing poetry and playing piano, arty
bohemian types – and perhaps as a result unable to pay the high rents
in city locations.
At Ziferblat you pay by the minute. That’s right, you have a living
room by the minute. The tag line is: “Everything is free except the
time you spend here.”
And the minutes are cheap, a few cents only, and like every good deal
it’s capped. So once you spent three to four hours, there’s no more to
pay for the day.
The top rate is about A$15-20 per day depending on the country. For
this, besides the comfortably furnished space, you get free coffee,
tea, water, juices, fruit, vegetables, snacks and facilities like a
kitchen and bathrooms.
Deconstructing the idea of home
Is this sort of commercial enterprise a further step towards
deconstructing our concepts of home and domestic living? After all, a
flat can be compared to a car. It sits idle most of the time when we
are at work and really is used only at the edges of the day.
Why pay for it when we are not even
there most of the time?
Yet we work hard to pay for our home and hope to make up the difference
when we sell it. Wouldn’t it be much smarter to outsource the whole
idea of the home? To have a home only when you need one and be
unencumbered by it when you don’t? Why pay for it when we are not even
there most of the time?
This makes even Airbnb seem old school, because with Airbnb I am still paying for my accommodation even if I am out sightseeing.
All that is missing to complete this new decentralised home is a mobile
storage service. But all I have to do is send a text message and they
pick up (or bring) and store my precious belongings. It’s physical
cloud storage for distributed living, modernism 3.0.
This concept opens up a whole new perspective on urban development.
Could it be that the current approach to high-density living is missing
this new 21st-century trend? Will we be burdened with inappropriate
outdated infrastructure that is not used as intended?
What’s more, the new approach will be nearly impossible to control and
regulate – unless we accept invasive forensic examination of our
private utility bills.
Has urban living changed more than we know?
I estimate, based on advertisements on Australian websites only, that
at least 10,000 people are sharing rooms in Sydney. Yet we also have to
consider rooms to share in Sydney being offered online in countries
like China, India, the Middle East, etc … to new arrivals before they
even leave.
A picture starts to emerge of room sharing that may be an underground
boom going on right now. Instead of 10,000 people being technically
homeless here in Sydney, the number may might well be closer to 50,000
or 100,000. That means a population ranging in size from Strathfield to
the combined suburbs of Mosman and North Sydney may be sharing rooms!
Has the horse bolted? Has the game changed so much that is it time to confront these new realities of urban living?
micro-tenants
The owner of Ziferblat calls his guests micro-tenants, slicing the pie
into ever thinner portions. Ziferblat and other versions of the
distributed home might well play a big part in the future of urban city
living. We just haven’t realised it yet, because we are too busy and
preoccupied with paying off the home we can’t really afford – while our
ten roomies in the three-bedroom flat next door have already moved on
metaphorically and literally.
You may ask, what about neighbours and a sense of belonging? But isn’t there a virtual reality app for that?
top contents
chapter previous next