Housing has become an essential commodity in the global economy, specifically within platform economies, as is clear in cases such as AirBnB. Platforms both contribute to and benefit from the precarious housing situation worldwide, as digital platform technologies accelerate the financialisation of housing on all scales, as property – from whole real-estate portfolios to single apartments – are rented and sold in an automated way. Rather, in a supposedly automated way: when Facebook allowed ‘redlining’, it effectively excluded people from some neighbourhoods by not allowing them to see rental ads in places where they were not welcome. Platforms are not neutral or "just" utilities. With property technology and its investment market aggressing existing housing landscapes, this development is "likely to serve the interests of people and places already benefiting from property-led accumulation, undermining the interests of property-less subjects and marginalised places."[1]

Many of the practices of housing-related platforms is active privatisation of communal housing, thus appropriating the duties of the public sector. Indeed, shared ownership and communal housing become something which is reconfigured to benefit private interests, rather than to work as a mechanism for collective solidarity. Yet, as long as the customer is satisfied, she may not see a difference between renting from WeWork, or from a commune/non-profit institution, as this difference is not visible: you do not experience how you contribute to private profits at the expense of public infrastructures. Rather, tenants may even find individual advantages with platform living, which the housing institutions do not supply.[2]

Platform capitalism is invading every part of the homes: Service platforms of care manage cleaning, nannies, home-shopping, and much more. Platforms such as Helpling render visible the need for cleaning by selling the commodity of a cleaning package, while the cleaners themselves are invisibilised (until they enter your apartment – where you don't have to be present when the cleaning package is being delivered). Platforms are maintained by invisibilised labour, much like capitalism always has been. The platformisation of housing issues does not eliminate but rather intensifies existing injustices and exclusions. The persons affected by real-estate platform capitalism usually experience inequalities resulting from issues of race, gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status, which often intersect.

If housing has historically been a topos related to the working class, today (at the latest) it can only be conceived intersectionally, that is, by closely connecting class issues with relations of gender and racism. By taking a closer look at the housing crises, the racialised feminisation of poverty can thus be revealed, and with it housing as a site of power relations at the intersection of race, class and gender. Yet, if secured and affordable, a home can also become a place for resistance and for safety. Of course, this latter kind of housing safety is not the "security" propagated by police regimes. And the Covid-19 pandemic has increased the use of housing as a site of home office and home schooling and has thus demonstrated the extent to which housing is a palpable space for production – atop the reproductive labour which has dominated the contours of the Western nuclear home over the past few centuries. As intersectional feminist critics like Silvia Federici show, there is a long history of the home as a site of the invisible reproduction of labour power, and hence the recent entering of precarious, invisibilised labours at the heart of the data economy and platformisation of cities is not a new phenomenon, but foundational to capitalism itself.

While platforms have been described as infrastructure, with this text I want to use the term infrastructure in an emancipatory way, rather than as platform, and to consider housing as a public duty. Housing is a human right and is to provide security as a base condition for freedom and any public engagement. The following vignettes describe housing as such an existential infrastructure with a specific focus on intergenerational alliances aiming at intersectional solidarity in housing. The first vignette will take on a conceptual approach through meditations on Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Virginia Woolf, Silvia Federici, Nicole Cox and Bell Hooks, who together form a strong band of sisters in arms, allied in their relevant contestations of contemporary situations throughout the last century.

The second vignette will deal with intersectional solidarity in contemporary housing – with projects that work towards de-capitalisation of housing, as advocated by solidarity economy housing groups and collectivisation campaigns. Groups like the habiTAT syndicate or the Mietshäuser Syndikat, the Verein für die Barrierefreiheit in der Kunst, im Alltag, im Denken (Association for Accessibility in Art, in Everyday Life, in Minds) with its Intersectional Stadthaus in Vienna all act intersectionally. They do so insofar as they gather the diversity of actors in their demands – anti-capitalist, migration-political, feminist, queer, disability-activist, anti-racist, anarchist – without distinguishing between principal and secondary contradictions.