When We Live Alone

The unprecedented rise of urban dwellers living alone today challenges normative ideas about home and raises questions about how this change in social structure and lifestyle affects cities as a whole. While the causes of living alone seem apparent—shifting social values, more flexible labour, new demographics, increased wealth, and changes to normative gender roles—their effects on society and its spatial configurations remain uncertain. Through a series of interconnected vignettes, the short documentary film When We Live Alone (27 minutes) interrogates this new urban condition, offering glimpses into the lives of individuals inhabiting singleton homes and the extended domestic sphere. Architect Takahashi Ippei, sociologist Yoshikazu Nango, along with urban dwellers living on their own navigate the audience through a series of independent spaces in Tokyo. If living alone is our new reality, the film asks, what does it look like? 

Although social life in Japan has traditionally been centred around the family, sole spaces are ingrained in Japanese urban culture and in the urban fabric. Typically, though, these spaces are functionally specific, like capsule hotels or single restaurants. Sociologist Yoshikazu Nango posits that this phenomenon is linked to the expanding individualization of society. “We’ve come from an era of standardized and industrialized production, to a new era that is defined by the distribution of diverse spaces adapted to many needs and desires.” This global economy of particularization renders the singularization of societies and the singleton lifestyle as a global trend that extends well beyond the Japanese context.

Inspired by this growing differentiation of needs and desires, architect Takahashi Ippei has conceived of a new type of residential space that builds on the idea of distinct sole spaces by further individualizing them. For his project, Apartment House, Ippei divides the house into its fundamental parts, creating eight singleton homes, each defined by a specific function. A house for bathing in; a house for working in; or a house for cooking in? Each resident has to choose how they envision spending their time alone at home. What was traditionally conceived of as the domestic space now “only exists as a moment out of the twenty-four hours in a day,” says Ippei. The city fills in remaining moments and fulfills all the functions that were removed from the home, encouraging the individuals who live alone in these spaces to leave their private dwellings and seek social interactions in the urban sphere.

When We Live Alone (2020) is the second in a three-part short documentary series, conceived by Giovanna Borasi, directed by Daniel Schwartz, and produced by the CCA. This series examines the ways in which changing societies, new economic pressures, and increasing population density are affecting the homes of various communities. Through the lens of architectural projects in different socio-political contexts, each episode of the series looks at the global scope as well as the local specificities of a particular issue: while the second episode examines how people who live alone engage with the city of Tokyo, the first part of the series, What It Takes to Make a Home (2019), engages the pressing issue of homelessness, and the third part of the series (to be released in 2023) addresses our rapidly growing aging population. 

Following screenings at film festivals and institutions worldwide, When We Live Alone is streaming on e-flux Live from April 1 through 15, 2022. Accompanying the film, we publish Solitary and Social, a text adapted from an interview with Yoshikazu Nango, conducted as part of the research for the film. It was first published as part of our web issue A Social Reset.

The documentary film series aligns with the CCA’s one-year investigation Catching Up With Life (March 2021–May 2022), an exploration of architecture’s ability (or lack of) to evolve in dialogue with society. Catching Up With Life thas manifested in a web issue A Social Reset, a publication and exhibition A Section of Now: Social Norms and Rituals as Sites for Architectural Intervention (on view at the CCA through May 1), a lecture series An Extended Family; a collaboration with e-flux architecture on new spatialities of labour and inequalities, titled Workplace; among others.

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