Trendy Dorms for Grown-Ups? The Creation of The Corporate Co-Living Submarket and The Production of Youthified Space

Abstract

Corporate co-living has emerged as a fast-growing, investor-driven housing model marketed primarily to young professionals. While often promoted as an affordable and flexible alternative for urban renters, corporate co-living reflects deeper shifts in housing provision, including the commodification of domestic life, the reduction of private space, and the bundling of services to enhance asset value. This dissertation examines the rise of corporate co-living as a spatial, economic, and social phenomenon, situating it within broader transformations in housing markets, urban governance, and young adult residential trajectories. Focusing on London, UK - a city with a dynamic co-living sector and a large population of young knowledge-economy workers - the study investigates how corporate co-living is structured, marketed, and distributed and what it reveals about contemporary urban change. It concentrates on a specific variant: for-profit, amenitized, and digitally mediated shared housing developed and managed by private firms. The findings are presented across three article-based chapters. The first chapter conceptualizes corporate co-living as a platform-integrated, service-oriented housing product and introduces a revised framework for understanding this model. The second chapter examines how co-living providers use service bundling and brand narratives to enhance tenant mobility and scale their operations across urban and financial geographies. The third maps the spatial distribution of corporate co-living in London, revealing its tendency to cluster in regeneration zones and transit-accessible outer boroughs - patterns that may contribute to increasingly age-selective residential landscapes. By analyzing the emergence of corporate co-living at the intersection of housing financialization, digital platform logic, and evolving lifestyles among young people, this dissertation contributes to critical urban scholarship on the reconfiguration of rental housing and the socio-spatial impacts of new residential formats.