Shared Housing: New Approaches to Re-evaluating Everyday Life in East-Central and Southeastern Europe between the Late Eighteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Massive migration movements made the urban centers of East-Central and Southeastern Europe grow at a dazzling rate around 1900. In rural areas, the reduction in labor required people in professional sectors, such as agriculture, to enter new communities of production. Due to housing shortages in the cities as well as the massive growth of urban populations and the need to make a living despite poorer earning opportunities and stronger competition in the local markets, people shared housing spaces in various ways. Yet, to date, there have been limited inquiries into the long history of shared housing in these regions of Europe. Furthermore, the dearth of studies concerning private everyday life in the historiography of these regions has created two asymmetries in the historical narrative. On the one hand, the history of housing has not yet been explicitly discussed from the perspective of “living” as a shared undertaking between unrelated people outside of familial environments. On the other hand, alongside a biased and group-based understanding of sociability (Brubaker 2002), perpetuating “imagined non-communities” (Zahra 2010), conventional historiographic narratives enshrine so-called minorities and migrants in “private” isolation. If at all, the history is retold as one of cultural participation (e.g. the “contribution” of Jews to the making of modernity) but not of private involvement. Nevertheless, research increasingly demonstrates that there was considerable contact between non-family members in housing sites––affecting the majority of the populations of cities but also rural places (i.e., farms). People shared apartments in urban centers with subtenants and bed lodgers, middle- und upper class people shared housing with domestics and other employees, and the phenomenon of “work at home” made private homes workplaces for the production of trading goods but also for encounters with peers. In the rural context, for instance, farmers hosted their helpers in their living sites. The sharing of housing spaces thus affected people from all social strata, who participated in different ways of “living together” and engaged in this process with different backgrounds and encounter.

The present call for articles is aimed at surveying the field to create a collage of the newest approaches and findings within this area and consequently provide a state-of-the-art springboard from which to reflect on the dynamics that arose between people outside of public spaces and the less visible effects of the experience of shared living as a process and encounter on both urban and rural environments.

Research questions might include the following: Who lived with whom? How did encounters, interactions, and relationships unfold in shared living spaces? How did people with heterogeneous religious, ethnic, national, linguistic, etc. affiliations cohabit? What impact did this practice have on the everyday lives of the individuals involved? How, if at all, did cities, municipalities, and other organizations address the situation of living spaces being shared contact zones? What implications for the making of the urban fabric and sociability in the countryside arise from analyzing shared housing sites?

The studies will be assembled under a shared heading in a special issue of a well-ranked history journal (indexed by at least Scopus, ERIH+, CEEOL, etc.) seeking to examine the spatial making and relational impact of shared housing, merging urban studies and rural history between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. We invite submissions of proposals for articles that address these questions from the lens of everyday life.

Proposals, including an extended abstract (400 words) and an academic biography (max. 100 words), are invited to be submitted via email to Susanne Korbel (susanne.korbel@uni-graz.at) and Oana Sorescu-Iudean (oana.sorescu-iudean@ubbcluj.ro) by January 31, 2025. Authors of the selected proposals will be notified by the mid-February, while manuscripts will need to be submitted before October 31, 2025. We envision having an online workshop with the selected authors to discuss the articles and their progress as well as our common research interests (in September, subject to the contributors’ availability).

References:
Rogers Brubaker, “Ethnicity without groups,” European Journal of Sociology 43, no. 2 (2002): 163-189.
Tara Zahra, “Imagined non-communities. National indifference as a category of analysis,” Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (2010): 93-119.