The Future of City Living
New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, London… have you noticed those cities are getting more and more jam packed these days?
Many top metropolises in the world are already too crowded, but it seems like they will only get even more packed – with urbanization continuing to push people from farms to towns, tier 2 to tier 1, tier 1 to international cities.
As cities becoming more crowded, accommodation options will shrink. Naturally, changes need to happen to accommodate how people would live, to maintain living standards and to enable people to thrive to the society continues to grow. This is why Coliving might be one of the best solutions forward.
Coliving What?
According to Wikipedia:
Coliving is a type of intentional community providing shared housing for people with shared intentions. This may simply be coming together for activities such as meals and discussion in the common living areas, yet may extend to shared workspace and collective endeavors such as living more sustainably.
So in essence – a bunch of people living together, doing things together. But surely, there is more to it than the surface level of connections.
Your Private Zone
You want to bustle and hustle the coins from big cities, but somehow you always swiftly flush them back into the system. Living in tier 1 cities are super expensive and will only get worse as time goes by.
While Coliving doesn’t offer you the 25 sqm room back home, you do get a private corner that lets you zone out and have your private moments, yet not so crazy as compared to renting a whole apartment to keep your bank account relatively content.
Putting the Co in Community
Yes, Coliving offers an environment that easily enables connections, having someone to share the dining table, have a morning coffee and chat about your weekend getaway and stuff.
But NO, It’s way more than having random humans to do things with you. For most of us, living in a different city means we are away from our direct and extended families. To top that, many city dwellers are transient – meaning that they only have 2–3 years to develop any sort of relationships.
Extended Read: We are in the Loneliness Epidemic
Coliving is a new lifestyle choice with a very different take on modern city living while putting back the human touches we so crave as human beings, in this digital age that forces us to face our screens 24/7.
The Epitome of a Sharing Economy
We have shared cabs and bikes for a while now, it’s just natural (?) that we share our living room too. Imagine how much isle time there is for your washer, living room, oven, balcony… when you rent your own place? At least 70–90%? Those are the luxury that you can have back in the suburbs, that may be best shared to cut down costs in the city.
Think college dorm but better and elevated – a proper Coliving space provides you with the amenities to facilitate your daily lives with minimized wastage so to make it more affordable to stay right in the center of New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, etc.
True Work-Life Balance
While I still have to put work-life balance for SEO 🙂 , work-life BLEND is the actual case here with Europe pushing the 4-day work week agenda and fewer and fewer weekly work hours, putting back control into employees’ hands.
Coliving seems to be the best fit to have you bring work to where you live (yet still having your zone) while bringing life to your work by giving you the human touches, the community element and a lifestyle that you can shape.
It might take a little while to even get used to thinking about it, but it is THE best time to start putting some thoughts behind it if you haven’t considered it.
