Meshing with your home: Seeking trouble in sharing dwelled spaces

While promising to allow us to be at home anywhere, home sharing platforms invite us to reduce our sense of private ownership over dwelling space. They call into question how we consider homes to be our ‘own’, how we might understand boundaries for ‘personal space’, and how we conceive of the assemblage of stuff surrounding us as making up our – or anybody’s – home. In this chapter, we probe how hosts and guests navigate the mundane negotiations of occupying one’s ‘own’ space at a (temporary) home. By assigning each other stays in Airbnb accommodations that were shared with a host and/or others, we observed the limits to discomfort in shrinking ‘personal’ space to make room with another dweller. While platform home sharing has become a dominant way to encapsulate a ‘home’ as a commodifiable unit of dwelled space, our experiences in sharing dwelling space point to ways that the ‘personal space’ of actors involved in these transactions meshes rather than borders. The implications of this meshing of homes could be considered alienating, liberating, or both, and offers a way of rethinking the home, rather than simply being an intrusion on it.