Mapping the emergence of new asset classes: Co-living development in Brussels, Luxembourg and Paris compared

This paper examines the development of co-living in three European cities to understand how global patterns of financialisation materialise in distinct built environments. The transformation of urban, private-rented markets since the GFC has seen the creation of new financial asset classes, enabled by the advent of digital technologies and the ‘automated’ operation of portfolios. Co-living initially emerged in major Western cities, as a financialised type of shared housing operated by specialised companies providing additional services. This rental niche has taken several spatial forms in different cities. We argue that these variations rely not only on the local characteristics of the built environment, but also on the specificities of local housing regimes, real estate markets and institutional frameworks, and the way global developments translate locally.
Using Brussels, Paris and Luxembourg as case studies, we map the co-living offer at an intra-urban scale, using original databases drawn from (automated) web scraping. Interviews and desk research further help us unpack the contextual factors that influence the geographies of co-living in each of these cities, which belong to contrasted housing regimes and where this niche rental segment presents different stages of development. Our presentation concludes with self-reflections on the level of comparability of our visualisations and their explanatory power in the process of understanding the role of co-living in spatialising specific forms of capital. We also discuss the potential of such databases and their visualisations in contributing to mitigating power imbalances stemming from information asymmetries between public and private actors under platform capitalism.