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ABSTRACT
This paper analyses the normalization of everyday sharing practices in two exemplary German neighbourhoods, which both provide numerous opportunities for sharing spaces, stuff, food and mobility carriers, but differ regarding their “philosophy”. The first case belongs to the increasingly popular “collaborative housing” model, the second one is a developer-driven, service-based project. Inspired by core ideas from Social Practice Theory, the guiding questions of this research are then 1) to which extent have sharing practices become a normal part of residents’ lives in these neighbourhoods and 2) what may explain observed differences? Evidence shows that residents in the collaborative housing case share more frequently, more regularly and over longer timespans than their counterparts in the developer-driven neighbourhood. I argue that this is due to a higher share of fitting practice configurations and a better integration of sharing practices into tenants’ typical patterns of everyday life.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Harald Heinrichs, Melanie Jaeger-Erben, Sylvie Douzou and Mathieu Durand-Daubin for their precious advice in the course of this research and feedback on previous versions of this article. I also express my gratitude to Harold Wilhite, whose expertise for designing the diary study was extremely helpful. I also would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful and constructive comments which clearly improved the initial version of this article.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. Translated from German.
2. Some (cf. Welch and Warde Citation2015) have rightfully pointed out that speaking of one Social Practice Theory is misleading as there is not yet a fully consolidated theory, but rather several branches of practice theories. While I fully agree with this observation, the purpose of my article is not theory development, but rather to make use of SPT thinking as a “heuristic aid stimulus for empirical research capable of rendering visible phenomena (…) that were previously off the radar.” (Reckwitz Citation2017, 115) For reasons of simplicity, I will hence use in the following the singular form of Social Practice Theory.
3. Nevertheless, both trends are clearly still niches in housing markets, with only a few hundred projects.
6. Translated from German.
10. I hence join Hitchings (Citation2012) who postulates that despite widespread scepticism “people can talk about their practices”.
11. As diary participants were asked to fill in their diaries at the end of the day, it appeared not accurate to track practice durations at the level of minutes. The lowest assumed time unit was hence set at 0,25 hours. Consequently, the values presented here are approximations of reality and numbers are rounded.
12. This code was created by aggregating the two practices of “getting and giving left-over food” and “getting and giving away used consumer goods”.
13. In the following, I will use the abbreviations MA for material elements, ME for meaning, S for skills and R for rules.
14. The same can be said about the very hybrid “learning lounges” which, counter-intuitively, are also equipped with a TV and a table football.
15. Even though also these low-coordinative practices may request some coordination with and adaptation to others: for instance, some interviewees reported that it took them some time to figure out busy and less busy times for doing laundry with the community washing machines.
16. I am grateful for this thought to one of the anonymous reviewers.